Other forms: counties
A county is a region of a country with its own local government. Yorkshire, Kent, Sussex, and the boundaries people argue about.
Britain has ceremonial counties, which are ancient and emotional, and administrative ones, which change and annoy everybody when they do. America has counties within states. English cricket is organised by county, which keeps the older boundaries alive. The word is used as an adjective for a certain kind of rural gentry, and describing somebody as terribly county is a British social observation rather than a geographical one.
1nouncountyAn area of a country with its own local administration.
“The county has three market towns.”
A county is the country of a count. Latin comitātus was the jurisdiction of a comes, a count or earl. England kept the word and eventually dropped the counts.
Latin
comitātus — jurisdiction of a count
Old French
conté
Anglo-Norman
counté
Middle English
countee
English, today
county
Built from
From Middle English countee, counte, conte, from Anglo-Norman counté, Old French conté (French comté), from Latin comitātus (“jurisdiction of a count”), from comes (“count, earl”). Cognate with Spanish condado (“county”) and Italian contea (“county”). a doublet of comitatus, borrowed directly from Latin. Mostly displaced native sċīr, whence Modern English shire.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA