Word.ws English Dictionary

counting rod

counting rod noun: one of a set of small bars, used by mathematicians in some Asian countries, placed either horizontally or vertically to represent any number and any fraction.

Noun

counting rod (plural counting rods)

  1. One of a set of small bars, used by mathematicians in some Asian countries, placed either horizontally or vertically to represent any number and any fraction.
    • In recent archaeological excavations a number of ancient counting-rods have been unearthed. More than 30 rods were found in August 1971 in Qianyang County of Shaanxi Province.[1983, Rongzhao Mei, “The Decimal Place-Value Numeration and the Rod and Bead Arithmetics”, in 中国古代科技成就 [Ancient China's Technology and Science] (China Knowledge Series), Beijing: Foreign Languages...

Forms of counting rod

pluralcounting rods

Origin of counting rod

Calque from Chinese 算籌／算筹 (suànchóu).

Questions about counting rod

What does counting rod mean?
Counting rod means one of a set of small bars, used by mathematicians in some Asian countries, placed either horizontally or vertically to represent any number and any fraction.
What part of speech is counting rod?
Counting rod is a noun.
What is the plural of counting rod?
The plural of counting rod is counting rods.

Words near counting rod in the dictionary

  1. counting one's days
  2. counting one's lucky stars
  3. counting out
  4. counting rhyme
  5. counting rhymes
  6. counting rod
  7. counting rods
  8. counting room
  9. counting rooms
  10. counting sheep
  11. counting sort

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: counting rod (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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