Names

The first known English use of zero was in 1598. Depending on the context, there may be different words used for the number zero, or the concept of zero. For the simple notion of lacking, the words "nothing" and "none" are often used. Sometimes, the word "nought" or "naught" is used. It is often called "oh" in the context of reading out a string of digits, such as telephone numbers, street addresses, credit card numbers, military time, or years (e.g. the area code 201 would be pronounced "two oh one"; a year such as 1907 is often pronounced "nineteen oh seven"). The presence of other digits, indicating that the string contains only numbers, avoids confusion with the letter O. For this reason, systems that include strings with both letters and numbers (e.g. Canadian postal codes) may exclude the use of the letter O. Slang words for zero include "zip", "zilch", "nada", and "scratch". "Nil" is used for many sports in British English. Several sports have specific words for a score of zero, such as "love" in tennis – from French l'oeuf, "the egg" – and "duck" in cricket, a shortening of "duck's egg"; "goose egg" is another general slang term used for zero.The modern numerical digit 0 is usually written as a circle or ellipse. Traditionally, many print typefaces made the capital letter O more rounded than the narrower, elliptical digit 0. Typewriters originally made no distinction in shape between O and 0; some models did not even have a separate key for the digit 0. The distinction came into prominence on modern character displays.

Symbols