Meaning
A conventional imagined remedy for insomnia: mentally picturing sheep jumping over a fence one by one and counting them until sleep comes. Used mostly of the futile ritual itself, as in I lay counting sheep till three in the morning. Light, whimsical register. Whimsical and usually weary or self-mocking in tone; almost never used in serious prose. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The documented lineage begins in early-twelfth-century Spain: the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsi, a Jewish convert from Huesca writing in Latin from Arabic sources, includes a tale in which a king's storyteller, wanting to sleep, tells of 2,000 sheep that must cross a flood-swollen river two at a time, then drops off after the first pair - a joke that assumes the audience already knew counting sheep as a sleep aid. The tale spread through medieval Europe (the Italian Cento Novelle Antiche, late 1200s), and Cervantes reworked it in Don Quixote (1605), where Sancho Panza counts goats ferried across a river. In English, the practice is mentioned by Harriet Martineau (1834) and Sabine Baring-Gould (1868), becoming a commonplace of the late nineteenth century. So the 'Spanish source' claim is correct in the sense of an Arabic-influenced Latin tale from Aragon, not a Spanish idiom borrowed directly.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- count one's sheep
- counting sheep
- counting sheep over a fence
Usage Examples
- I lay there counting sheep until the numbers turned into grocery lists.
- If you cannot sleep, try counting sheep, though it has never once worked for me.
- He was so exhausted after the double shift that he fell asleep before he could count ten sheep.