Count nouns are a morphosyntactic subclass of common nouns (Gillon 1992). They can be used with the determiners "one" and "several", but not with "much" and "little"; they admit singular and plural number. Count nouns apply to individuals of extremely diverse types. Thus the question we address in this paper: is there anything characteristic to the meanings of count nouns? It is comparable in intent to: can one give a purely semantic definition of verbs? Four proposals have been discussed in the literature: proposals involving internal structure, atomic reference, boundedness and countability. We consider them in turn. Our strategy will be to show that these are not necessary conditions for a common noun to be a count noun. This will lead us to a different type of answer to the question of what is common to the meanings of count nouns.