  We discuss the systematics of power counting in general effective field
theories, focussing on those that are nonrenormalizable at leading order. As an
illuminating example we consider chiral perturbation theory gauged under the
electromagnetic $U(1)$ symmetry. This theory describes the low-energy
interactions of the octet of pseudo-Goldstone bosons in QCD with photons and
has been discussed extensively in the literature. Peculiarities of the standard
approach are pointed out and it is shown how these are resolved within our
scheme. The presentation follows closely our recent discussion of power
counting for the electroweak chiral Lagrangian. The systematics of the latter
is reviewed and shown to be consistent with the concept of chiral dimensions.
The results imply that naive dimensional analysis (NDA) is incomplete in
general effective field theories, while still reproducing the correct counting
in special cases.
