Tally means to count or keep track of things, or the count itself. When you tally votes in a class election, you're carefully counting each ballot to find out who won. When you tally up the points in a basketball game, you're adding them to get the final score.

You might see someone keeping a tally by making four vertical lines and then crossing them with a fifth diagonal line to show groups of five. This makes counting easier: instead of staring at twenty-seven individual marks, you can quickly count five groups of five plus two extra.

A tally can also be the final count itself. If someone asks, “What's the tally?” after collecting donations for a school fundraiser, they want to know the total amount collected.

People use tally in different contexts: scientists tally their observations during experiments, store owners tally their daily sales, and scorekeepers tally points during competitions. The word suggests careful, accurate counting where getting the number right really matters.