Article Free Pass
Thank you for helping us expand this topic!
The topic counting is discussed in the following articles:

animal learning

  • TITLE: animal learning (zoology)
    SECTION: Discrimination of relational and abstract stimuli
    ...array vary from trial to trial, in order to rule out the possibility that the animal is responding in terms of other features, such as differences in total area or brightness, between the arrays. Counting experiments have been tried on birds more frequently than on any other class of animal, and several species, notably ravens, rooks, and jackdaws, have solved this type of problem. This...


  • TITLE: arithmetic
    SECTION: Natural numbers
    In a collection (or set) of objects (or elements), the act of determining the number of objects present is called counting. The numbers thus obtained are called the counting numbers or natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …). For an empty set, no object is present, and the count yields the number 0, which, appended to the natural numbers, produces what are known as the whole numbers.


  • TITLE: spectroscopy (science)
    SECTION: Atom counting
    The concept of the atom is an ancient one; the Greek philosopher Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 bc) proposed a form of “atomism” that contained the essential features of the chemical atom later introduced by the British chemist John Dalton in 1810. The British physicist Ernest Rutherford spoke of counting the atoms and in 1908, with the German physicist Hans Geiger,...

counting by 20’s

  • TITLE: Celtic languages
    SECTION: Linguistic characteristics of the Insular Celtic tongues
    ...once thought to be exotic, such as the initial position of the verb in the sentence, have been convincingly demonstrated to be organic developments from Indo-European. Others, such as the system of counting by 20s, are clearly innovations, but this system is shared by English (“three score and ten”), French (quatre-vingts “80”), and Danish, in all of which it is...

particle physics

  • TITLE: principles of physical science
    SECTION: Developments in particle physics
    ...behaviour as will account for the observation of the track of a muon coming to an end and that of an electron starting from the end point. At the heart of all fundamental theories is the concept of countability. If a certain number of particles is known to be present inside a certain space, that number will be found there later, unless some have escaped (in which case they could have been...


Please select the sections you want to print
Select All
MLA style:
"counting". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
APA style:
counting. (2014). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from
Harvard style:
counting. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 10 July, 2014, from
Chicago Manual of Style:
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. "counting", accessed July 10, 2014,


Editing Tools:
We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles.
(Please limit to 900 characters)

Or click Continue to submit anonymously: