• counter •
Pronunciation: kæwn-têr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. The flat surface of a long piece of furniture over which sales transactions or food preparation take place. 2. Someone or something that keeps count. 3. A marker in games requiring markers.
Notes: Did you ever wonder what counters are supposed to count? I do all the time; it's one of my favorite ways of consuming the vacant moment. This English word is a lexical orphan.
In Play: We have two idiomatic phrases built around this word 'over the counter' meaning "without a prescription" and "legitimate" and 'under the counter', meaning "illegitimate". The former is often abbreviated OTC. Lunch counters, long counters with stools, were commonplace in the previous century: "The civil rights demonstrations of the 60s began with lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina." So counters played a major role in American history.
Word History: Today's Good Word was snatched from Anglo-Norman conter when it wasn't looking. Anglo-Norman got it from Old French conter "to add up, tell a story", inherited from Latin computare "to count, calculate, compute". The Latin word is made up of com- "(together) with" + putare, originally meaning "to prune, trim" but later "to reckon", from PIE pau- "to strike", source also of Latin pavire "to beat (down), trample", Greek paiein "to strike", and Lithuanian pjauti "to cut" and pjuklas "saw". (Now for a note of gratitude for Diane McGuire for sharing with us today's phonologically and semantically squiggly Good Word.)