Word.ws English Dictionary

count 'em

count 'em phrase: emphasizes a number; literally, check the number yourself.

Phrase

count 'em

  1. (informal) Emphasizes a number; literally, check the number yourself.
    • Passing the Congregation Shearith Israel on Central Park West (a white whale of a building with a triangular pediment supported by four count ’em four massive Corinthian columns), Professor Solanka scurrying through the downpour remembered the newly bat-mitzvahed thirteen-year-old girl he’d...2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 5
    • Once I went to Greece with a man who had left his wife and six—count 'em, six—children.2001, Suzanne Ostro, “Antisocial Baby Notes”, in Rochelle Ratner, editor, Bearing Life: Women's Writings on Childlessness, page 66

Forms of count 'em

alternative formcount them

Questions about count 'em

What does count 'em mean?
Count 'em means emphasizes a number; literally, check the number yourself.
What part of speech is count 'em?
Count 'em is a phrase.

Words near count 'em in the dictionary

  1. counselour
  2. counselours
  3. counsels
  4. counsels of perfection
  5. count
  6. count 'em
  7. count against
  8. count agent
  9. count agents
  10. count angels on pinheads
  11. Count Branicki's mice

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: count 'em (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “count 'em.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/count_%27em. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.