Body Count

Body count usually means the number of sexual partners a person has had. Online, it is often used in a negative or judgmental way, especially about women.

Origins of the Term

The sexual meaning of body count grew out of the older military term for the number of people killed. Merriam-Webster dates “body count” to 1962, and the phrase became especially associated with the Vietnam War, where enemy deaths were used as a measure of military progress.

From there, body count developed a sexual meaning: a tally of the people someone has slept with. This use goes back at least to 1979, when Woodstock Census, a survey of the 1960s generation, used the heading “Body Count—Promiscuity In The Sixties” for statistics on respondents’ numbers of sexual partners.

The term body count continued to appear in sexual contexts during the 1980s. By 2001, it was appearing in mainstream relationship coverage.

Related Terms

• Slut