Names for the number 0 in English Names for the number 0 in English Zero is the usual name for the number 0 in English. In British English "nought" is also used. In American English "naught" is used occasionally for zero, but as with British English, "naught" is more often used as an archaic word for nothing. "Nil", "love", and "duck" are used by different sports for scores of zero. It is quite common in English to describe decades with a plural of the first year of the decade for example "the nineties" which can be written as "the 90s". There was a debate on what to
Zero of a function generally used when there are infinitely many zeros, and they have some non-trivial topological properties. For example, a level set of a function formula_1 is the zero set of formula_26. The cozero set of formula_1 is the complement of the zero set of formula_1 (i.e., the subset of formula_23 on which formula_1 is nonzero). In algebraic geometry, the first definition of an algebraic variety is through zero sets. Specifically, an affine algebraic set is the intersection of the zero sets of several polynomials in a polynomial ring formula_31 over a field. In this context, a zero set is sometimes called