There is a need to maintain an explicit distinction between digit zero and letter O,[a] 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.
[1] 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").
[2] In his discussion of "naught" and "nought" in Modern English Usage (see below), H. W. Fowler uses "cipher" to name 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".
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")[10] as a potential moniker for the new decade.
However, it has not become 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".
[19] The American music and lifestyle magazine Wired favoured "Naughties", which they claim was first proposed by the arts collective Foomedia in 1999.
[20] However, the term "Naughty Aughties" was suggested as far back as 1975 by Cecil Adams, in his column The Straight Dope.
[21] In spoken English, the number 0 is often read as the letter "o", often spelled oh.
[25] The use of O as a number can lead to confusion as in the ABO blood group system.
Since the "O" signifies the lack of antigens, it could be more meaningful to English-speakers for it to represent the number "oh" (zero).
Similarly, a bowler's analysis might read 0-50, meaning he has conceded 50 runs without taking a wicket.
The following cricketer's rhyme illustrates this:[31][32] And when eleven are matched against eleven, And wrestle hard the mastery to gain, Who tops the score is in the seventh heaven, Who lays an egg, in an abyss of pain.
[31] In tennis, the word "love" is used to replace 0 to refer to points, sets and matches.
[34][35] Although the use of "duck" in cricket can be said to provide tangential evidence, the l'œuf hypothesis has several problems, not 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".)
[37] 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 the foodstuff.
The number 0 is represented by zero while null is a representation of an empty set {}.