A county is a land area of local government within a country. A county may have cities and towns within its area. Originally, in continental Europe, a county (comté, condado, Grafschaft) was the land under the jurisdiction of a count (comte, conde, Graf).

Counts are called earls in post-Celtic Britain, Ireland and France—the term is from Old Norse jarl and was introduced by the Vikings—but there is no correlation between counties and earldoms. Rather, county, from French comté, was simply used by the Normans after 1066 to replace the native English term scir ([ʃir])—Modern English shire, as the Anglo-Saxon system of shires was unique and thus hard for the Norman invaders to comprehend so they resorted to calling them counties. A shire was an administrative division of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom (Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, etc.), usually named after its administrative centre: for example, Gloucester, in Gloucestershire; Worcester, in Worcestershire; etc. or originate from these forms of names (e.g. Wiltshire derived from 'Wiltonshire' with Wilton as its old county town).

Thus, whereas the word comté denoted a sovereign jurisdiction in the original French, the English county denotes a subdivision of a sovereign jurisdiction.