to count one's blessings
17
4.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
dar gracias
- When times are tough, it's important to count your blessings and focus on the good things in life.
- count my blessings every day
- count your blessings this Thanksgiving
- try counting your blessings
Examples
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Today, we count our blessings.
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Have some maturity and count your blessings because things could have been far worse.
Blog text (21) -
You really should count your blessings, you know that?
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It's time to count our blessings
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You should count your blessings.
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Simply taking your time to "count your blessings" makes one realize how many are out there.
Blog text (18) -
Young people of today, take a moment of your time and count your blessings.
Blog text (34) -
The best solution I could think of was to count my blessings.
Blog text (19) -
You count your blessings and stop complaining, both of you.
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How I got so lucky, I 'll never know, but I 'm definitely counting my blessings.
Blog text (9)
Synonyms
56
1.4
To show you are grateful, often in words or prayer
30
3.7
Try to find something positive in a bad situation
10
6.7
Feel very glad because something lucky happened
How Grateful
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase literally involves 'count' (enumerate) and 'blessings' (fortunate things), so a learner who knows the constituents can infer it means to take stock of one's good things and be grateful. This compositional meaning is cross-linguistically common and follows an obvious metaphorical counting-for-appreciation pattern, making it immediately accessible to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Count one's blessings comes from the old habit of actually listing the good things in your life: people would count each blessing one by one to remember them. That's why it means 'to be grateful for the good things you have'.