See bean counter in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"ref": "1985 August 2, “Editorial: Sniffing at DOC health costs”, in Gainsville Sun, retrieved 13 Sep 2009, page 14A:",
"text": "As any good bean counter will tell you, it costs money to treat people at a hospital.",
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"ref": "2008 December 23, Robert Chew, “Who Is Bernie Madoff? Many Investors Didn't Ask”, in Time, retrieved 13 Sep 2009:",
"text": "And, in our case, the accounting firm of Halpern & Mantovani, CPA, in Encino, Calif., Chais' chief bean counter, pumped out the quarterly statements as if it were all rock solid.",
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"ref": "2025 November 12, Christian Wolmar, “A proper BTP presence is worth every penny”, in RAIL, number 1048:",
"text": "With bean counters hopefully no longer in charge of the railways, Great British Railways has an opportunity to justify the adjective in its name.",
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"A person who is excessively interested in controlling or reducing expenses, increasing profits, or in quantitative details in general."
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"(idiomatic, mildly derogatory) A person who is excessively interested in controlling or reducing expenses, increasing profits, or in quantitative details in general."
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"sense": "person excessively interested in expenses and quantitative details",
"tags": [
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"word": "bean counter"
}
Download raw JSONL data for bean counter meaning in English (3.5kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-01-13 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (96027d6 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.