Names for the number 0 in English a formal reading of a team's scoresheet. There is no definitive origin for the tennis score name for 0, "love". It firstly occurred in English, is of comparatively recent origin, and is not used in other languages. The most commonly believed hypothesis is that it is derived from English speakers mis-hearing the French "l'œuf", "the egg", which was the name for a score of zero used in French, because the symbol for a zero used on the scoreboard was an elliptical zero symbol, which visually resembled an egg. There is tangential support for this in the use of "duck" as
Zero game piles or a Hackenbush diagram with nothing drawn on it. The Sprague–Grundy theorem applies to impartial games (in which each move may be played by either player) and asserts that every such game has an equivalent Sprague–Grundy value, a "nimber", which indicates the number of pieces in an equivalent position in the game of nim. All second-player win games have a Sprague–Grundy value of zero, though they may not be the zero game. For example, normal Nim with two identical piles (of any size) is not the zero game, but has value 0, since it is a second-player winning situation