Counting has always been at the heart of corpus linguistics and is what unites us as a community. The papers at CL2025 range across many areas in linguistics but what we have in common is that we will all be counting something and somehow. The premises of corpus linguistics being that what counts is how language is used - and that counting how language is used reveals aspects of language that are invisible to the ‘naked eye’. This invisibility may come about because a pattern is either so large, so diffuse, or so small that human perception alone cannot measure it. The centrality of counting is so ingrained that we rarely step back to look directly at our ‘numerical habits’ – and in the well-established tradition of reflexivity in CL - that is exactly what we would like to take the opportunity do in this plenary. We open up the space for reflection by asking five questions about what counts, asking: Why do we count? What do we count?  How do we count? What counts as a big number? What shouldn’t we count? Addressing these questions shows that counting is a theory-laden process because of all the decision making which underpins it and, at the same time, unveils its creative power.