The word zero came into the English language via French zéro from the Italian zero, a contraction of the Venetian zevero form of Italian zefiro via ṣafira or ṣifr. In pre-Islamic time the word ṣifr (Arabic صفر) had the meanin… See more

Ancient Egyptian numerals were of base 10. They used hieroglyphs for the digits and were not positional. In one papyrus written around 1770 BC, a scribe recorded daily incomes and expenditures for the pharaoh's court, usin… See more

Today, the numerical digit 0 is usually written as a circle or ellipse. Traditionally, many print typefaces made the capital letter O more rounded than the narrower, elliptical digit 0. Typewriters originally made no distinction i… See more

The concept of zero plays multiple roles in mathematics: as a digit, it is an important part of positional notation for representing numbers, while it also plays an important role as a number in its own right in many algebraic s… See more

The value zero plays a special role for many physical quantities. For some quantities, the zero level is naturally distinguished from all other levels, whereas for others it is more or less arbitrarily chosen. Fo… See more