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81-502: There is a need to maintain an explicit distinction between digit zero and letter O , which, because they are both usually represented in English orthography (and indeed most orthographies that use Latin script and Arabic numerals ) with a simple circle or oval , have a centuries-long history of being frequently conflated. However, in spoken English, the number 0 is often read as the letter " o " (" oh "). For example, when dictating

162-468: A   (GA) , alg ae , qu ay , b ea ch , b ee , dec ei t , p eo ple , k ey , k eye d , f ie ld ( hyg ie n e ), am oe ba , cham oi s   (GA) , deng ue   (GA) , beg ui ne , g uy ot , and y nambu (See Sound-to-spelling correspondences ). (These examples assume a more-or-less standard non-regional British English accent. Other accents will vary.) Sometimes everyday speakers of English change counterintuitive spellings, with

243-411: A telephone number , the series of digits "1070" may be spoken as "one zero seven zero" or as "one oh seven oh", even though the letter "O" on the telephone keypad in fact corresponds to the digit 6. In certain contexts, zero and nothing are interchangeable, as is "null". Sporting terms are sometimes used as slang terms for zero, as are "nada", "zilch" and "zip". "Zero" and "cipher" are both names for

324-447: A few phonological rules, but that is not the reason why its spelling is fixed. Another example involves the vowel differences (with accompanying stress pattern changes) in several related words. For instance, photographer is derived from photograph by adding the derivational suffix - ⟨er⟩ . When this suffix is added, the vowel pronunciations change largely owing to the moveable stress: Other examples of this type are

405-543: A large number of Germanic words have ⟨y⟩ in word-final position. Some other examples are ⟨ph⟩ pronounced / f / (which is most commonly ⟨f⟩ ), and ⟨ch⟩ pronounced / k / (which is most commonly ⟨c⟩ or ⟨k⟩ ). The use of these spellings for these sounds often marks words that have been borrowed from Greek . Some researchers, such as Brengelman (1970), have suggested that, in addition to this marking of word origin, these spellings indicate

486-505: A modern accident as might be thought, but have descended that way from Old English . There is a distinction in British English between the two, but it is not one that is universally recognized. This distinction is that "nought" is primarily used in a literal arithmetic sense, where the number 0 is straightforwardly meant, whereas "naught" is used in poetical and rhetorical senses, where "nothing" could equally well be substituted. So

567-530: A more formal level of style or register in a given text, although Rollings (2004) finds this point to be exaggerated as there would be many exceptions where a word with one of these spellings, such as ⟨ph⟩ for / f / (like telephone ), could occur in an informal text. Spelling may also be useful to distinguish in written language between homophones (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings), and thus resolve potential ambiguities that would arise otherwise. However in most cases

648-447: A number can lead to confusion as in the ABO blood group system . Blood can either contain antigen A (type A), antigen B (type B), both (type AB) or none (type O). Since the "O" signifies the lack of antigens, it could be more meaningful to English-speakers for it to represent the number "oh" (zero). However, "blood type O" is properly written with a letter O and not with a number 0. In sport,

729-511: A series of one or more for sizes larger than 1. For American Wire Gauge , the largest gauges are written 1/0, 2/0, 3/0, and 4/0 and pronounced "one aught", "two aught", etc. Shot pellet diameters 0, 00, and 000 are pronounced "single aught", "double aught", and "triple aught". Decade names with a leading zero (e.g., 1900 to 1909) were pronounced as "aught" or "nought". This leads to the year 1904 ('04) being spoken as "[nineteen] aught four" or "[nineteen] nought four". Another acceptable pronunciation

810-919: A similar degree of difficulty when encoding (writing), English is more difficult when decoding (reading), as there are clearly many more possible pronunciations of a group of letters. For example, in French, /u/ (as in "true", but short), can be spelled ⟨ou, ous, out, oux⟩ ( ou , nous , tout , choux ), but the pronunciation of each of those sequences is always the same. However, in English, while /uː/ can be spelled in up to 24 different ways, including ⟨oo, u, ui, ue, o, oe, ou, ough, ew⟩ ( spook , truth , suit , blues , to , shoe , group , through , few ) (see Sound-to-spelling correspondences below), all of these spellings have other pronunciations as well (e.g., as in foot , us , build , bluest , so , toe , grout , plough , sew ) (See

891-509: A source of spelling innovations: diminutive versions of women's names that sound the same as men's names have been spelled differently: Nikki and Nicky , Toni and Tony , Jo and Joe . The differentiation in between names that are spelled differently but have the same phonetic sound may come from modernisation or different countries of origin. For example, Isabelle and Isabel sound the same but are spelled differently; these versions are from France and Spain respectively. As an example of

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972-438: A team's score might read 50/0, meaning the team has scored fifty runs and no batter is out. It is read as "fifty for no wicket" or "fifty for none". Similarly, a bowler's analysis might read 0-50, meaning he has conceded 50 runs without taking a wicket. It is read as "no wicket for fifty" or "none for fifty". A batsman who is out without scoring is said to have scored "a duck ", but "duck" is used somewhat informally compared to

1053-471: A word. For instance, ⟨gh⟩ represents /f/ at the end of some words ( tough / t ʌ f / ) but not in others ( plough / p l aʊ / ). At the beginning of syllables , ⟨gh⟩ is pronounced /ɡ/ , as in ghost / ɡ oʊ s t / . Conversely, ⟨gh⟩ is never pronounced /f/ in syllable onsets other than in inflected forms, and is almost never pronounced /ɡ/ in syllable codas (the proper name Pittsburgh

1134-420: Is James Bond 's designation, 007, which is always read as "double-o seven", not "double-zero seven", "zero-zero seven", or "o o seven". The letter "o" ("oh") is also used in spoken English as the name of the number 0 when saying times in the 24-hour clock , particularly in English used by both British and American military forces. Thus 16:05 is "sixteen oh five", and 08:30 is "oh eight thirty". The use of O as

1215-536: Is "[nineteen] oh four". While "2000s" has been used to describe the decade consisting of the years 2000–2009 in all English speaking countries , there have been some national differences in the usage of other terms. On January 1, 2000, the BBC listed the noughties (derived from "nought") as a potential moniker for the new decade. This has become a common name for the decade in the U.K. and Australia, as well as some other English-speaking countries. However, it has not become

1296-432: Is an archaism , and that "all" is now used in phrases such as "for all (that) I know", where once they would have been "for aught (that) I know".) However, "aught" and "ought" are also sometimes used as names for 0, in contradiction of their strict meanings. The reason for this is a rebracketing , whereby "a nought" and "a naught" have been misheard as "an ought" and "an aught". Samuel Johnson thought that since "aught"

1377-477: Is an exception). Some words contain silent letters , which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the ⟨l⟩ in talk , half , calf , etc., the ⟨w⟩ in two and sword , ⟨gh⟩ as mentioned above in numerous words such as though , daughter , night , brought , and the commonly encountered silent ⟨e⟩ (discussed further below). Another type of spelling characteristic

1458-503: Is frequently seen with the -ed suffix in archaic and pseudoarchaic writing, e.g. cursèd indicates the ⟨e⟩ should be fully pronounced. The grave being to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced ( warnèd , parlìament ). In certain older texts (typically British ), the use of the ligatures ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ is common in words such as archæology , diarrhœa , and encyclopædia , all of Latin or Greek origin. Nowadays,

1539-626: Is in the seventh heaven, Who lays an egg , in an abyss of pain. A name related to the "duck egg" in cricket is the "goose egg" in baseball , a name traced back to an 1886 article in The New York Times , where the journalist states that "the New York players presented the Boston men with nine unpalatable goose eggs", i.e., nine scoreless innings. In tennis , the word "love" is used to replace 0 to refer to points, sets and matches. If

1620-432: Is marked by the ⟨e⟩ as having the value /eɪ/ . In this context, the ⟨e⟩ is not pronounced, and is referred to as a " silent e ". A single letter may even fill multiple pronunciation-marking roles simultaneously. For example, in the word ace , ⟨e⟩ marks not only the change of ⟨a⟩ from / æ / to /eɪ/ , but also of ⟨c⟩ from / k / to / s / . In

1701-629: Is more commonly used in mathematics and science, whereas "cipher" is used only in a literary style. Both also have other connotations . One may refer to a person as being a "social cipher", but would name them "Mr. Zero", for example. In his discussion of "naught" and "nought" in Modern English Usage (see below), H. W. Fowler uses "cipher" to name the number 0. In English, "nought" and "naught" mean zero or nothingness, whereas "ought" and "aught" (the former in its noun sense) strictly speaking mean "all" or "anything", and are not names for

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1782-432: Is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters. For example, ⟨th⟩ represents two different sounds (the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives ) (see Pronunciation of English th ), and

1863-644: Is probably fairly close to optimal for all modern English dialects, as well as for the attested dialects of the past several hundred years. In these cases, a given morpheme (i.e., a component of a word) has a fixed spelling even though it is pronounced differently in different words. An example is the past tense suffix - ⟨ed⟩ , which may be pronounced variously as /t/ , /d/ , or /ᵻd/ (for example, pay / ˈ p eɪ / , payed / ˈ p eɪ d / , hate / ˈ h eɪ t / , hated / ˈ h eɪ t ɪ d / ). As it happens, these different pronunciations of - ⟨ed⟩ can be predicted by

1944-413: Is related to word origin. For example, when representing a vowel, ⟨y⟩ represents the sound / ɪ / in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon ), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter ⟨i⟩ . Thus, myth / ˈ m ɪ θ / is of Greek origin, while pith / ˈ p ɪ θ / is a Germanic word. However,

2025-400: 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. Although the use of "duck" in cricket can be said to provide tangential evidence, the l'œuf hypothesis has several problems, not

2106-428: Is used for an undefined state (for example, a memory location that has not been explicitly initialised). Sporting terms ( see above ) are sometimes used as slang terms for zero, as are " nada ", " zilch " and " zip ". "Zilch" is a slang term for zero, and it can also mean "nothing". The origin of the term is unknown. English orthography English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing

2187-411: Is used infrequently in U.S. English, although it has become common in soccer broadcasts. In American sports, the term "nothing" is often employed instead of zero. Thus, a 3-0 score in a baseball game would be read as "three-nothing" or "three to nothing". [2] When talking about a team's record in the standings, the term "oh" is generally used; a 3-0 record would be read as "three and oh". In cricket ,

2268-481: The English language , allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling , hyphenation , capitalisation , word breaks , emphasis , and punctuation . As with the orthographies of most other world languages , written English is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in

2349-785: The Spelling-to-sound correspondences below). Thus, in unfamiliar words and proper nouns , the pronunciation of some sequences, ⟨ough⟩ being the prime example, is unpredictable to even educated native English speakers. Attempts to regularise or reform the spelling of English have usually failed. However, Noah Webster promoted more phonetic spellings in the United States, such as flavor for British flavour , fiber for fibre , defense for defence , analyze for analyse , catalog for catalogue , and so forth. These spellings already existed as alternatives, but Webster's dictionaries helped standardise them in

2430-517: The article wizard to submit a draft for review, or request a new article . Search for " Awiht " in existing articles. Look for pages within Misplaced Pages that link to this title . Other reasons this message may be displayed: If a page was recently created here, it may not be visible yet because of a delay in updating the database; wait a few minutes or try the purge function . Titles on Misplaced Pages are case sensitive except for

2511-522: The communicative competence of native speakers. Followers of these arguments believe the less abstract surface forms are more "psychologically real" and thus more useful in terms of pedagogy . Some English words can be written with diacritics ; these are mostly loanwords , usually from French. As vocabulary becomes naturalised, there is an increasing tendency to omit the accent marks, even in formal writing. For example, rôle and hôtel originally had accents when they were borrowed into English, but now

Names for the number 0 in English - Misplaced Pages Continue

2592-495: The digraph ⟨th⟩ (two letters) represents /θ/ . In hatch / h æ tʃ / , the trigraph ⟨tch⟩ represents /tʃ/ . Less commonly, a single letter can represent multiple successive sounds. The most common example is ⟨x⟩ , which normally represents the consonant cluster /ks/ (for example, in tax / t æ k s / ). The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within

2673-792: The history of the English language . There are a number of contributing factors. First, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift , account for a tremendous number of irregularities. Second, relatively recent loan words generally carry their original spellings, which are often not phonetic in English. The romanization of languages (e.g., Chinese) has further complicated this problem, for example when pronouncing Chinese proper names (of people or places), which use either pinyin (official in China) or Wade–Giles (official in Taiwan). The regular spelling system of Old English

2754-661: The insertion of /ᵻ/ before the /z/ in the spelling - ⟨es⟩ , but does not indicate the devoiced /s/ distinctly from the unaffected /z/ in the spelling - ⟨s⟩ . The abstract representation of words as indicated by the orthography can be considered advantageous since it makes etymological relationships more apparent to English readers. This makes writing English more complex, but arguably makes reading English more efficient. However, very abstract underlying representations, such as that of Chomsky & Halle (1968) or of underspecification theories, are sometimes considered too abstract to accurately reflect

2835-502: The voiceless alveolar sibilant can be represented by ⟨s⟩ or ⟨c⟩ . It is, however, not (solely) the shortage of letters which makes English spelling irregular. Its irregularities are caused mainly by the use of many different spellings for some of its sounds, such as /uː/, /iː/ and /oʊ/ ( t oo , tr ue , sh oe , fl ew , thr ough ; sl ee ve , l ea ve , e ven , s ei ze , s ie ge ; st o l e , c oa l , b ow l , r ol l , o ld , m ou ld ), and

2916-424: The - ⟨ity⟩ suffix (as in agile vs. agility , acid vs. acidity , divine vs. divinity , sane vs. sanity ). See also: Trisyllabic laxing . Another example includes words like mean / ˈ m iː n / and meant / ˈ m ɛ n t / , where ⟨ea⟩ is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to

2997-541: The Latin debitum , and ⟨s⟩ in island to link it to Latin insula instead of its true origin, the Old English word īġland . ⟨p⟩ in ptarmigan has no etymological justification whatsoever, only seeking to show Greek origin despite being a Gaelic word. The spelling of English continues to evolve. Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to

3078-441: The Old English " nāwiht " and " nōwiht ", respectively, both of which mean " nothing ". They are compounds of no- ("no") and wiht ("thing"). The words "aught" and "ought" (the latter in its noun sense) similarly come from Old English " āwiht " and " ōwiht ", which are similarly compounds of a ("ever") and wiht . Their meanings are opposites to "naught" and "nought"—they mean " anything " or " all ". (Fowler notes that "aught"

3159-852: The UK. Partly because English has never had any official regulating authority for spelling, such as the Spanish Real Academia Española , the French Académie française , the German Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung , the Danish Sprognævn , and the Thai Ratchabandittayasapha , English spelling, compared to many other languages, is quite irregular and complex. Although French, Danish, and Thai, among other languages, present

3240-410: The United States. (See American and British English spelling differences for details.) Besides the quirks the English spelling system has inherited from its past, there are other irregularities in spelling that make it tricky to learn. English contains, depending on dialect , 24–27 consonant phonemes and 13–20 vowels . However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet , so there

3321-451: The accents are almost never used. The words were originally considered foreign—and some people considered that English alternatives were preferable—but today their foreign origin is largely forgotten. Words most likely to retain the accent are those atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, café and pâté both have a pronounced final ⟨e⟩ , which would otherwise be silent under

Names for the number 0 in English - Misplaced Pages Continue

3402-657: The assertion that "love" comes from the Scots word "luff", meaning "nothing", falls at the first hurdle, because there is 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

3483-648: The consonant sound itself when they come from different morphemes, as with the ⟨nn⟩ in unnamed ( un + named ). Any given letters may have dual functions. For example, ⟨u⟩ in statue has a sound-representing function (representing the sound / u / ) and a pronunciation-marking function (marking the ⟨t⟩ as having the value / tʃ / opposed to the value / t / ). Like many other alphabetic orthographies, English spelling does not represent non-contrastive phonetic sounds (that is, minor differences in pronunciation which are not used to distinguish between different words). Although

3564-480: The conventional orthography ... and are, as is well known, related to the underlying forms of a much earlier historical stage of the language. There has, in other words, been little change in lexical representation since Middle English , and, consequently, we would expect ... that lexical representation would differ very little from dialect to dialect in Modern English ... [and] that conventional orthography

3645-557: The earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by highly trained, multilingual printing compositors , who occasionally used a spelling pattern more typical for another language. For example, the word ghost was spelled gost in Middle English , until the Flemish spelling pattern was unintentionally substituted, and happened to be accepted. Most of the spelling conventions in Modern English were derived from

3726-437: The foodstuff. It was popularised by American announcer Bud Collins . In certain contexts, zero and nothing are interchangeable, as is "null". However, in mathematics and many scientific disciplines, a distinction is made (see null ). The number 0 is represented by zero while null is a representation of an empty set {}. Hence in computer science a zero represents the outcome of a mathematical computation such as 2−2, while null

3807-887: The 💕 Look for Awiht on one of Misplaced Pages's sister projects : [REDACTED] Wiktionary (dictionary) [REDACTED] Wikibooks (textbooks) [REDACTED] Wikiquote (quotations) [REDACTED] Wikisource (library) [REDACTED] Wikiversity (learning resources) [REDACTED] Commons (media) [REDACTED] Wikivoyage (travel guide) [REDACTED] Wikinews (news source) [REDACTED] Wikidata (linked database) [REDACTED] Wikispecies (species directory) Misplaced Pages does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Awiht in Misplaced Pages to check for alternative titles or spellings. You need to log in or create an account and be autoconfirmed to create new articles. Alternatively, you can use

3888-457: 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 the first recorded usage of the word "love" to mean "no score" is by Hoyle in 1742. In recent years, a set won 6-0 ("six-love") has been described as a bagel , again a reference to the resemblance of the zero to

3969-471: The irregular nature of English spelling, ⟨ou⟩ can be pronounced at least nine different ways: /aʊ/ in out , /oʊ/ in soul , / uː / in soup , / ʌ / in touch , / ʊ / in could , / ɔː / in four , / ɜː / in journal , / ɒ / in cough , and / ə / in famous (See Spelling-to-sound correspondences ). In the other direction, / iː / can be spelled in at least 18~21 different ways: b e ( c e d e ), sk i ( mach i n e ), bologn

4050-490: The late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme , and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. This is partly due to the large number of words that have been loaned from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English , without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms , and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of

4131-435: The least of which is that in court tennis the score was not placed upon a scoreboard. There is also scant evidence that the French ever used l'œuf as the name for a zero score in the first place. ( 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,

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4212-505: The letter ⟨t⟩ is pronounced by most speakers with aspiration [tʰ] at the beginning of words, this is never indicated in the spelling, and, indeed, this phonetic detail is probably not noticeable to the average native speaker not trained in phonetics. However, unlike some orthographies, English orthography often represents a very abstract underlying representation (or morphophonemic form) of English words. [T]he postulated underlying forms are systematically related to

4293-653: The ligatures have been generally replaced by the digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ ( encyclopaedia , diarrhoea ) in British English or just ⟨e⟩ ( encyclopedia , diarrhea ) in American English , though both spell some words with only ⟨e⟩ ( economy , ecology ) and others with ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ ( paean , amoeba , oedipal , Caesar ). In some cases, usage may vary; for instance, both encyclopedia and encyclopaedia are current in

4374-502: The mid-18th century. It used to be pronounced /ʃiː/ , similar to the Norwegian pronunciation, but the increasing popularity of the sport after the mid-20th century helped the /skiː/ pronunciation replace it. There was also a period when the spelling of a small number of words was altered to make them conform to their perceived etymological origins. For example, ⟨b⟩ was added to debt (originally dette ) to link it to

4455-707: The name Maria used to be pronounced like the name Mariah , but was changed to conform to this system. This only further complicates the spelling, however. On the one hand, words that retained anglicised spellings may be misread in a hyperforeign way. On the other hand, words that are respelled in a 'foreign' way may be misread as if they are English words, e.g. Muslim was formerly spelled Mooslim because of its original pronunciation. Commercial advertisers have also had an effect on English spelling. They introduced new or simplified spellings like lite instead of light , thru instead of through , and rucsac instead of rucksack . The spellings of personal names have also been

4536-492: The name of the board game is " noughts & crosses ", whereas the rhetorical phrases are "bring to naught", "set at naught", and "availeth naught". The Reader's Digest Right Word at the Right Time labels "naught" as "old-fashioned". Whilst British English makes this distinction, in American English , the spelling "naught" is preferred for both the literal and rhetorical/poetic senses. "Naught" and "nought" come from

4617-408: The new spellings usually not judged to be entirely correct. However, such forms may gain acceptance if used enough. An example is the word miniscule , which still competes with its original spelling of minuscule , though this might also be because of analogy with the word mini . Inconsistencies and irregularities in English pronunciation and spelling have gradually increased in number throughout

4698-782: The normal English pronunciation rules. Moreover, in pâté , the acute accent is helpful to distinguish it from pate . Further examples of words sometimes retaining diacritics when used in English are: ångström —partly because its symbol is ⟨Å⟩ — appliqué , attaché , blasé , bric-à-brac , Brötchen , cliché , crème , crêpe , façade , fiancé(e) , flambé , jalapeño , naïve , naïveté , né(e) , papier-mâché , passé , piñata , protégé , résumé , risqué , and voilà . Italics , with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, adiós , belles-lettres , crème brûlée , pièce de résistance , raison d'être , and vis-à-vis . It

4779-444: The number 0 can have different names depending on the sport in question and the nationality of the speaker. Many sports that originated in the UK use the word " nil " for 0. Thus, a 3-0 score in a football match would be read as "three-nil". [1] Nil is derived from the Latin word " nihil ", meaning "nothing", and often occurs in formal contexts outside of sport, including technical jargon (e.g. "nil by mouth") and voting results. It

4860-482: The number 0 is often read as the letter " o ", often spelled oh . This is especially the case when the digit occurs within a list of other digits. While one might say that "a million is expressed in base ten as a one followed by six zeroes", the series of digits "1070" can be read as "one zero seven zero", or "one oh seven oh". This is particularly true of telephone numbers (for example 867-5309 , which can be said as "eight-six-seven-five-three-oh-nine"). Another example

4941-903: The number 0, but the use of "cipher" for the number is rare and only used in very formal literary English today (with "cipher" more often referring to cryptographic cyphers ). The terms are doublets , which means they have entered the language through different routes but have the same etymological root, which is the Arabic " صفر " (which transliterates as "sifr"). Via Italian this became "zefiro" and thence "zero" in modern English, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Romanian and Italian ("cero" in Spanish). But via Spanish it became " cifra " and thence " cifre " in Old French , "cifră" in Romanian and "cipher" in modern English (and " chiffre " in modern French). "Zero"

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5022-484: The number 0. Nevertheless, they are sometimes used as such in American English ; for example, "aught" as a placeholder for zero in the pronunciation of calendar year numbers. That practice is then also reapplied in the pronunciation of derived terms, such as when the rifle caliber .30-06 Springfield (introduced in 1906) is accordingly referred to by the name "thirty-aught-six". The words "nought" and "naught" are spelling variants. They are, according to H. W. Fowler , not

5103-512: The other hand, it also adds to the discrepancy between the way English is written and spoken in any given location. Letters in English orthography positioned at one location within a specific word usually represent a particular phoneme . For example, at / ˈ æ t / consists of 2 letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨t⟩ , which represent / æ / and / t / , respectively. Sequences of letters may perform this role as well as single letters. Thus, in thrash / θ r æ ʃ / ,

5184-403: The other terms listed in this section. It is also always accompanied by an article and thus is not a true synonym for "zero": a batter scores " a duck" rather than "duck". The term derives from the phrase "a duck's egg" for a score of zero. The following cricketer's rhyme illustrates this: And when eleven are matched against eleven, And wrestle hard the mastery to gain, Who tops the score

5265-525: The phonemic spelling of a variety of Middle English , and generally do not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late 15th century (such as the Great Vowel Shift ). Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most recognised variations being British and American spelling , and its overall uniformity helps facilitate international communication. On

5346-415: The preceding ⟨c⟩ is pronounced / s / , rather than the more common value of ⟨c⟩ in word-final position as the sound / k / , such as in attic / ˈ æ t ɪ k / . ⟨e⟩ also often marks an altered pronunciation of a preceding vowel. In the pair mat and mate , the ⟨a⟩ of mat has the value / æ / , whereas the ⟨a⟩ of mate

5427-540: The reason for the difference is historical, and it was not introduced to resolve amibiguity. Nevertheless, many homophones remain that are unresolved by spelling (for example, the word bay has at least five fundamentally different meanings). Some letters in English provide information about the pronunciation of other letters in the word. Rollings (2004) uses the term "markers" for such letters. Letters may mark different types of information. For instance, ⟨e⟩ in once / ˈ w ʌ n s / indicates that

5508-588: The same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English spelling is. For example, / ʌ / , normally written ⟨u⟩ , is spelled with an ⟨o⟩ in one , some , love , etc., due to Norman spelling conventions which prohibited writing ⟨u⟩ before ⟨m, n, v⟩ due to the graphical confusion that would result. ( ⟨n, u, v⟩ were written identically with two minims in Norman handwriting; ⟨w⟩

5589-448: The score during a game is 30-0, it is read as "thirty-love". Similarly, 3-0 would be read as "three-love" if referring to the score during a tiebreak, the games won during a set, or the sets won during a match. The term was adopted by many other racquet sports. There is no definitive origin for the usage. It first occurred in English, is of comparatively recent origin, and is not used in other languages. The most commonly believed hypothesis

5670-469: The sense of "naught" meaning "bad" is still preserved in the word " naughty ", which is simply the noun "naught" plus the adjectival suffix " -y ". This has never been spelled "noughty". The words "owt" and "nowt" are used in Northern English . For example, if tha does owt for nowt do it for thysen : if you do something for nothing do it for yourself. The word aught continues in use for 0 in

5751-469: The single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form. English orthography does not always provide an underlying representation; sometimes it provides an intermediate representation between the underlying form and the surface pronunciation. This is the case with the spelling of the regular plural morpheme, which is written as either - ⟨s⟩ (as in tat, tats and hat, hats ) or - ⟨es⟩ (as in glass, glasses ). Here,

5832-442: The spelling - ⟨s⟩ is pronounced either / s / or / z / (depending on the environment, e.g., tats / ˈ t æ t s / and tails / ˈ t eɪ l z / ) while - ⟨es⟩ is usually pronounced /ᵻz/ (e.g. classes /ˈklæsᵻz/ ). Thus, there are two different spellings that correspond to the single underlying representation | z | of the plural suffix and the three surface forms. The spelling indicates

5913-557: The universal descriptor because, as Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland pointed out early in the decade, "[Noughties] won't work because in America the word 'nought' is never used for zero, never ever". The American music and lifestyle magazine Wired favoured "Naughties", which they claim was first proposed by the arts collective Foomedia in 1999. However, the term "Naughty Aughties" was suggested as far back as 1975 by Cecil Adams , in his column The Straight Dope . In spoken English,

5994-583: The use of identical sequences for spelling different sounds ( ove r , ove n , m ove ). Furthermore, English no longer makes any attempt to anglicise the spellings of loanwords , but preserves the foreign spellings, even when they do not follow English spelling conventions like the Polish ⟨cz⟩ in Czech (rather than *Check ) or the Norwegian ⟨fj⟩ in fjord (although fiord

6075-602: The way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩ have in the International Phonetic Alphabet . As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, and some borrowed words have had their spelling changed to conform to this system. For example, Hindu used to be spelled Hindoo , and

6156-491: The word vague , ⟨e⟩ marks the long ⟨a⟩ sound, but ⟨u⟩ keeps the ⟨g⟩ hard rather than soft. Doubled consonants usually indicate that the preceding vowel is pronounced short. For example, the doubled ⟨t⟩ in batted indicates that the ⟨a⟩ is pronounced / æ / , while the single ⟨t⟩ of bated gives /eɪ/ . Doubled consonants only indicate any lengthening or gemination of

6237-762: Was formerly common in American English to use a diaeresis to indicate a hiatus , e.g. coöperate , daïs , and reëlect . The New Yorker and Technology Review magazines still use it for this purpose, even as general use became much rarer. Instead, modern orthography generally prefers no mark ( cooperate ) or a hyphen ( co-operate ) for a hiatus between two morphemes in a compound word. By contrast, use of diaereses in monomorphemic loanwords such as naïve and Noël remains relatively common. In poetry and performance arts, accent marks are occasionally used to indicate typically unstressed syllables that should be stressed when read for dramatic or prosodic effect. This

6318-424: Was formerly the most common spelling). In early Middle English, until roughly 1400, most imports from French were respelled according to English rules (e.g. bataille – battle , bouton – button , but not double , or trouble ). Instead of loans being respelled to conform to English spelling standards, sometimes the pronunciation changes as a result of pressure from the spelling, e.g. ski , adopted from Norwegian in

6399-401: Was generally used for "anything" in preference to "ought", so also "naught" should be used for "nothing" in preference to "nought". However, he observed that "custom has irreversibly prevailed in using 'naught' for 'bad' and 'nought' for 'nothing'". Whilst this distinction existed in his time, in modern English, as observed by Fowler and The Reader's Digest above, it does not exist today. However,

6480-493: Was swept away by the Norman Conquest , and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in

6561-844: Was written as two ⟨u⟩ letters; ⟨m⟩ was written with three minims, hence ⟨mm⟩ looked like ⟨vun, nvu, uvu⟩ , etc.). Similarly, spelling conventions also prohibited final ⟨v⟩ . Hence the identical spellings of the three different vowel sounds in love , move , and cove are due to ambiguity in the Middle English spelling system, not sound change. In 1417, Henry V began using English, which had no standardised spelling, for official correspondence instead of Latin or French which had standardised spelling, e.g. Latin had one spelling for right ( rectus ), Old French as used in English law had six and Middle English had 77. This motivated writers to standardise English spelling, an effort which lasted about 500 years. awiht From Misplaced Pages,

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