/ˈrɛkən/
[verb] To think, believe, or calculate something; to consider a situation or make a judgment about it. In everyday speech, it often simply means 'to think' or 'to suppose.'
Originally a word for counting beads or coins, 'reckon' quietly became one of English's most powerful words for thought itself.
The word 'reckon' stretches back to the very roots of the English language, emerging from the Old English verb 'gerecenian,' which meant to explain, arrange, or give an account of something. This Old English form was closely tied to practical, physical acts — sorting things out, putting them in order, naming them one by one. It carried a strong sense of deliberate, careful action, the kind of methodical attention a merchant might give to a tray of coins or a clerk to a column of figures.
Old English 'gerecenian' came from the Proto-Germanic root '*rekenōną,' which was shared across the early Germanic languages. Old High German had 'rehhanon,' meaning to count or explain, and Old Saxon had 'rekinon' with a similar meaning. Old Frisian, the language most closely related to Old English, had 'rekenia.' All of these point to an even older root meaning something like 'to move in a straight line' or 'to arrange in order' — the idea of bringing scattered things into a neat, countable sequence.
When Norman French flooded into English after 1066, many Old English words for thinking and calculating were pushed aside or replaced by Latin-rooted alternatives. Yet 'reckon' survived, perhaps because it was so deeply embedded in everyday commercial and domestic life. By the Middle English period, forms like 'rekenen' and 'recknen' were in wide use, and the word had already begun its journey from pure arithmetic toward something more mental and abstract. To 'reckon up' meant to add figures; to 'reckon with' a person meant to settle accounts with them.
The great shift came as 'reckon' moved from counting objects to weighing ideas. By the 14th and 15th centuries, English speakers were using it to mean 'to consider' or 'to regard as,' and by the 16th century it was firmly established as a word for forming an opinion or making a judgment. Shakespeare used it in this broader sense, and it appeared in religious writing too, where 'being reckoned righteous' meant being considered or counted as good in the eyes of God — a beautiful survival of the original counting metaphor.
In American English, particularly in the South and West, 'reckon' became the everyday word for 'suppose' or 'think,' a usage that arrived with early British settlers and then held on long after British English itself began to prefer words like 'think' or 'believe.' In Britain today, the word feels slightly informal or regional, but it never disappeared. Behind its casual, conversational surface lies a word that has been doing serious work — counting, ordering, judging, and thinking — for over a thousand years.