Names for the number 0 in English the score was not placed upon a scoreboard, and there is scant evidence that the French ever used "l'oeuf" as the name for a zero score in the first place, that name being as anecdotal as the hypothesis that "love" is then derived from it. (Jacob Bernoulli, for example, in his "Letter to a Friend", used "à but" to describe the initial zero–zero score in court tennis, which in English is "love-all".) Some alternative hypotheses have similar problems. For example: The assertion that "love" comes from the Scots word "luff", meaning "nothing", falls at the first hurdle, because there is
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