A Whole Lot of Nothing

Subtract one from one and you get nothing. Or do you? For a number representing nothing there are a lot of synonyms. If nothing is nothing - you can't touch it, hold it, or see it – then why are there so many words meaning the same thing?

Roman numerals did not represent zero in any way; were they right? Is the zero represented in every other language and culture? I wondered whether an etymologists look at the many synonyms could unravel this puzzle. Read on …….

Zero came to English from Old French, earlier found in Medieval Latin zephirum, and from Arabic sifr and Sanskrit sunya-m ‘empty place, desert’.

Nil is, as many will know, abbreviated Latin and has only been used in English since 1833. Correctly nihil or nihilum meaning ‘nothing, not at all, in vain’; it comes from the negative of hilum meaning ‘small thing, trifle’.

Nought is from Old English nowiht ‘nothing’, and onlt used to mean ‘zero’ since the 15th century.

Naught is from Old English nawiht and literally means ‘no wiht’ ‘no thing, no creature’. Again, not until the 15th century did it come into use as the a synonym for ‘zero’.

Nothing is from Old English ‘no thing’, and has been around since Saxon times.

Null is another of Latin derivation, French nul and Latin nullus, and ultimately Proto-Indo-European from ne unus ‘not one’.

None is from Middle English non, Old English nan, and from Germanic ne ‘no’.

Nada is an American slang word gaining in popularity in the UK, it is Spanish for ‘nothing’ and was introduced as a slang word by the writings of Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place published in 1933.

Zip dates from 1900, US student slang for a grade scoring zero. It gained more general popularity in the 1970s when used to refer to a sporting defeat without scoring.

Zilch initially, from 1933, was always capitalized and used to refer to an insignificant person. This was inspired by the satirical magazine Ballyhoo, which featured a character named Elmer Zilch who gave an insight into advertising and the consumer culture. A contemporary of Elmer was Joe Zilch, a fictional vaudeville performer represented what we might today call ‘Joe Public’. Not until 1957 is there any record of it meaning ‘zero’.

Cipher may most often be seen as a synonym for ‘code’ these days, but it first came to English from Old French cifre it meant ‘zero’. Also seen in Spanish and Italian as cifra, all these can be traced to Arabic sifr and ultimately a loan-word from Sanskrit sunya-s ‘empty’.

Sweet Fanny Adams also meant nothing. The story is a sad one and begins with a young girl named Fanny Adams who was murdered in 1867 in Alton, Hampshire, England. The phrase became associated with the idea of something worthless or nonexistent, possibly due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Fanny Adams's death. While the exact circumstances of its usage in the military and its widespread adoption are not fully documented, it's clear that "Sweet Fanny Adams" became a popular slang term for "nothing" over time.

In tennis the term ‘love’ is used to represent zero. This is an Anglicised l’oeuf as ‘the egg’ was said to be likened to the 0.

And not only the Romans failed to have a zero, the Greeks (although they had a word for it), nor the Babylonians didn’t either. Indeed, the concept of ‘zero’ is actually quite recent compared to other numbers. Fibonacci is credited with bringing zero to Europe in the early 13th century – the concept was clearly already in use, but not in a mathematical sense. The Chinese used an image to represent zero, but that image was simply a space. The concept of zero before decimals was introduced in the 3rd century AD in India. In the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas, such as the Mayans, the zero was included – and to get into a discussion of where they got it from is not something I’m going to attempt. Like 1 to 9, 0 is considered a cardinal number and you can also have negative 0.

Does this answer the question of why there are so many versions of zero? Maybe.