census

Pluralcensuses, censusses, census

Formscensuses, censusing, censused

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An official count of the members of a population, not necessarily human, usually the residents or citizens of a particular region, and often carried out at regular intervals.

   The latest census showed that the city's population had grown by nearly ten percent.

   Rangers took a census of the elk herd before setting this year's hunting limits.

   Similarcount, headcount, enumeration

   Note

   The official count goes back to Latin cēnsus, from the verb cēnseō, the same root that gives English censor. You take or conduct a census of a population, whether of citizens, a herd of elk or, in Dune, the desert Fremen. The plural is censuses; censusses and an unchanged census also appear, but censuses is the form to use.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A count or tally of things, not necessarily an official one.

   Scholars have compiled a census of every surviving copy of the first edition.

   A rough census of the guests told us we would run short of chairs.

   Similarcount, tally, inventory

   Note

   Here the word loosens its tie to the official count: no government is needed, only something to count. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) stretches it furthest, asking in what census of living creatures the dead of mankind are included. Beside count or tally, the word still carries some of the formality of its official sense.

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To carry out a census of a population or an area.

   Field biologists census the breeding birds on each plot twice a season.

   Officials censused the refugee camps to plan food deliveries.

   Similarcount, survey, enumerate

   Note

   The verb was already at work by 1893, when the Census of India, 1891 described a schedule page as “capable of censussing 8 individuals”. Its spelling wavers like the plural of the noun: censusing or censussing, censuses or censusses after he or she, and censused for the past. The single s is the safer pick here too.

4. 4
   verbintransitive

   To gather the figures that make up a census.

   Survey teams census at dawn, when the birds are most active.

   After years of censusing on the wetlands, he could tell every duck by its call.

   Similarcount, survey

   Note

   Without an object the verb names the work itself, and it can surface as an -ing noun with the thing counted placed in front: waterfowl censussing, as Fauna & Flora put it in 1965. That order reverses the verb that takes an object, where the population follows: census the waterfowl. It is at home in field surveys and zoology journals.

5. 5
   nounhistoricalcountable

   A kind of tax that feudal lords levied on their peasants.

   Peasants on the estate owed the lord a yearly census on top of their labor.

   Bad harvests left many villagers unable to pay the census that year.

   Similarlevy, tribute

   Note

   The feudal levy survives only in writing about the past; no one pays a census today. In such writing it can sit beside the official count and be mistaken for it, and the verbs tell them apart: a census that is paid or owed is this tax, while a census that is taken or conducted is a count.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   A count of the separate patterns within a larger pattern, most often the ash of a soup or a methuselah.

   A census of the ash from a million random soups showed which objects turn up most often.

   Once the methuselah finally stabilized, the census counted twenty-four separate objects in its debris.

   Note

   Three pieces of jargon carry this sense. A soup is a random starting pattern, and its ash is what remains once activity dies down: objects that sit still or repeat. A methuselah is a small seed that takes unusually long to settle. The census sorts that ash into separate objects and tallies how many of each kind appear.

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