Zero
From Thinkmath
Contents |
Meaning
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Etymology
From Italian zero from Arabic sifr (losing the f sound and adding the o ending).
Related mathematical terms
What's in a word?
The importance and central discovery of zero is well attested in the near universality of its name. Like coffee, which is virtually the same in every language, the name 'zero' (or something quite close to it) followed the product around the world. The mathematical idea of zero originated with Arabic mathematicians. The Arabic name for it, sifr, appears in our word cipher, which, in some contexts, still means zero.
When Italian lost the f sound in that word, it generated 'zero', which is still the word for zero in Italian and which, with little or no spelling change, is also the word in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Polish, and English. The f sound remains in Turkish, Swahili, and modern Arabic.
An ancient dispute about whether zero was or was not, in fact, a true number accounts for its other common name, null, from the Latin nulla figura, 'not a number.' With minor spelling variations, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Finnish, Indonesian, and Russian chose this direction.
Cipher is also used in connection with reading and writing (e.g., decipher), and this sense was taken up in Hebrew, which, of the languages mentioned above, is the closest relative of Arabic. So Hebrew uses this root to mean book, library, and (religious) scribe, and needed to choose another term for the meaning 'zero.'
