Too many to count. You use it when the number is so big — or so scattered — that nobody would sit down and actually count them. "Countless people have asked me that." "She's told me countless times." A thing worth knowing: it almost never means literally uncountable. If you asked hard enough, someone probably could count them. It means "so many that counting is not the point." It's a feeling word dressed as a number word. That's why it lives so comfortably in complaints and in praise — countless hours, countless mistakes, countless stars — and why it sounds a bit dramatic if you use it for eight or nine of something. It only goes in front of a noun, and that noun is plural: countless books, countless problems. You can't say "the problems were countless" in normal speech — well, you can, and old writing does, but it sounds like a poem. And you can't put a number near it: not "countless three cars." It feels slightly more written than spoken. In everyday talk most people say "so many" or "a million." In an essay or a speech, countless is the natural choice.

數不清的、無數的