I come from competitive programming, so people always make things as short as possible, I have seen variables named that many times, it always meant count and I don't think anyone tried to be funny with that. Also, at my job we used to work with SQL and there you'd name functions that, mainly due to the fact that SQL has a limit of I think 30 bytes to name variables and functions, if you have a function that counts the animals in a specific farm, it's usually more understandable to abbreviate count over farm or animal.

Usually you just get used to some abbreviations and use them even if you don't need to. I for example would always abbreviate total as tot, even if there was no limit on name lengths. Tot actually means dead in German now that I think of it, and I only just realized this and don't think anyone thought of death ever when reading my variable names. It certainly was never intended as a joke.