On February 21, 2000, the following material comes from http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm?term=HOPCOUNT&exact=1
The number of point-to-point links in a transmission path. Since each link is
terminated at a network device such as a router or gateway, the processing
performed within the device to determine how to forward the packet adds overhead
to the transmission. Although each point-to-point link is a technically a hop,
the hop count is the number of network devices between the starting node and the
destination node.