Names for the number 0 in English no authoritative evidence that there has ever been any such word in Scots in the first place. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word "love" in English to mean "zero" was to define how a game was to be played, rather than the score in the game itself. Gambling games could be played for stakes (money) or "for love (of the game)", i.e. for zero stakes. The first such recorded usage quoted in the OED was in 1678. The shift in meaning from "zero stakes" to "zero score" is not an enormous conceptual leap, and
Names for the number 0 in English the name for a score of zero by a batsman in cricket, which name derives from the full name "the duck's egg" for that score. The following cricketer's rhyme illustrates this: A name related to the "duck egg" in cricket is the "goose egg" in baseball, a name whose origin is a description in "The New York Times" of 1886 where the journalist states that "the New York players presented the Boston men with nine unpalatable goose eggs", i.e. nine scores of zero. However, the "l'oeuf" hypothesis has several problems, not the least of which is that in court tennis