Why Do We Say Countertops

A friend and well-known carpenter asked, “why do we say countertops? What are they counter to? The wall?”

English loves to take words that have different spellings and origins and just smush them up into the same word with the same spelling and go, “yeah, that should confuse the piss out of everyone who tries to learn this language.” Meaning, we can get a sentence like, “the Count counterintuitively counted on the countertop being done by now”. Go screw yourself, English. (Let me write that sentence in French for you, so you can peek beneath the covers a little: Le comte contre-intuitivement compté sur le comptoir étant fait.)

The word for “counter”, as in the thing that holds up almost every remodel job, comes from the Latin word computare, as in the root of the word “computer”, which means something or someone that calculates. It entered Old French sometime in the 1300s as contoeur (from comptoir), and was used to describe the table where sales and banking occurred, where things were counted by a counter. The counter (person) used the counter (object) to count upon.

By the 1800s, English had respelled “counter” and generalized the term from a market or banking table to a general word to describe any surface upon which transactions occur, especially in supply stores. It’s where we get the terms “over the counter” and “under the counter”. It became common to refer to kitchens as having counters and then countertops by the early 1900s.

Counter as in to be in opposition to something, comes from a different French word, contre, which means “against” (still does) from the Latin word contra (as in contradance, where dancers move towards and away from each other), which is different from the battle move of “countering” an attack, which comes from encounter. And a Count, as in the title of nobility, is from a different Latin root altogether and has nothing to do with either kitchens, banking, or battle moves (and instead is from the Latin word for “companion”).

So that’s why we say countertops. The real question is why we added “tops” to the word. Open to ideas.