Word.ws English Dictionary

count one's blessings

count one's blessings verb: to focus one's attention on the circumstances of one's life which are pleasant or fortunate, especially with the intention of diverting one's thoughts from serious or disagreeable matters.

Verb

count one's blessings (third-person singular simple present counts one's blessings, present participle counting one's blessings, simple past and past participle counted one's blessings)

  1. (idiomatic) To focus one's attention on the circumstances of one's life which are pleasant or fortunate, especially with the intention of diverting one's thoughts from serious or disagreeable matters.
    • Of course if she begins to preach, and to tell me to count my blessings, I shall send her away.1915, Eleanor H. Porter, chapter 3, in Pollyanna Grows Up, The Page Company
    • Rupert Murdoch isn't somebody to sit back and count his blessings.1995 May 22, Richard Lacayo et al., “Bart Simpson Calling”, in Time

Forms of count one's blessings

third-person singular presentcounts one's blessings
present participlecounting one's blessings
past participlecounted one's blessings
pastcounted one's blessings

Questions about count one's blessings

What does count one's blessings mean?
Count one's blessings means to focus one's attention on the circumstances of one's life which are pleasant or fortunate, especially with the intention of diverting one's thoughts from serious or disagreeable matters.
What part of speech is count one's blessings?
Count one's blessings is a verb.
What is the past tense of count one's blessings?
The past tense of count one's blessings is counted one's blessings.

Words near count one's blessings in the dictionary

  1. count nouns
  2. count off
  3. count on
  4. count on one hand
  5. count on the fingers of one hand
  6. count one's blessings
  7. count one's chickens
  8. count one's days
  9. count one's lucky stars
  10. count out
  11. count palatinate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: count one's blessings (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-count one's blessings.ogg.

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