counts

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular present of count.

   The teacher counts the students before the bus leaves.

   Each judge counts the points on a separate scorecard.

   Note

   Beyond tallying, the verb form often means "matters," with no object at all: every vote counts. Followed by as and a noun, it classifies instead: that counts as a win. It shares its spelling with the plural noun. A singular subject in front of it, like the teacher or each judge, marks it as the verb.

   In this contest, every single vote counts.

   A draw still counts as a point in the standings.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of count.

   The defendant faced two separate counts of fraud.

   Pollen counts rise sharply across the region in early spring.

   Note

   The plural spreads across the noun's main uses, and each has its own pattern. Tallies usually put the thing measured first: pollen counts, blood counts. Legal charges take of before the offense: two counts of fraud. Each count in an indictment is a separate charge, so the number of counts says how many distinct accusations a defendant must answer, not how serious any one of them is.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   Values that are enumerated directly as whole numbers of occurrences rather than expressed as a proportion or percentage.

   Epidemiologists often model disease counts rather than infection rates.

   The field survey recorded counts of nesting birds at each site.

   Similarnumbers, tallies

   Note

   A statistician's term for keeping the raw number: forty nests or twelve cases, not twelve per thousand. Counts cannot fall below zero or come in fractions, so analysts usually model them with distributions built for whole numbers, such as the Poisson, rather than treating them as continuous measurements. Reporting counts alongside rates shows both how many and how common.

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