Mysteries of vernacular: Zero - Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel

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Though the first written number system can be dated back to 2500 years ago in Mesopotamia, a zero-like symbol did not appear until 7th century CE India. Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel track the evolution of zero from a dot to the symbol we use today, as well as the Arabic, Italian and French roots of the word.

Lesson by Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel, animation by Jessica Oreck.

Mysteries of vernacular:

Zero,

a number that indicates an absence of units.

In order to understand the genesis of the word zero,

we must begin with the very origins of counting.

The earliest known archaeological evidence of counting

dates back approximately 37,000 years

and is merely a series of notches in bone.

It wasn't until around 2500 B.C.

that the first written number system

began to take form in Mesopotamia,

using the units one, ten, and sixty.

Fast forward another three millennia

to seventh century India

where mathematicians used a single dot

to distinguish between numbers

like 25, 205, and 250.

Employed as both a placeholder and a number,

this all-powerful dot eventually morphed

into the symbol we know today.

The word zero comes from the Arabic safira,

whose literal translation is empty.

Passing through Italian as zefiro,

zero came into English in the seventeenth century.

A second descendant of the Arabic root

was adopted into English through old French

as the word cipher.

Originally sharing the meaning empty with zero,

cipher later came to describe a code,

as early codes often used complicated substitutions

between letters and numbers.

From this shared empty origin,

zero continues to represent the number

that represents nothing.