Names for the number 0 in English call the first decade of the 21st century, as "00s" is not usually pronounced as a word. Apart from side stepping the issue and calling the decade the "two-thousands" (2000s) there is no agreed wording, although in Britain and some other countries "noughties" was also used. There is a need to maintain an explicit distinction between digit zero and letter O, which, because they are both usually represented graphically in English orthography (and indeed most orthographies using Latin script and Arabic numerals) with a simple circle or oval, have a centuries-long history of being frequently conflated. However, in spoken English,
Old English phonology Old English phonology Old English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative since Old English is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of the language, and the orthography apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology. Old English had a distinction between short and long (doubled) consonants, at least between vowels (as seen in "sun" and "son", "to put" and "to steal"), and a distinction between short vowels and long vowels in stressed syllables. It had a larger number of vowel