Zero Meaning
/ˈzɪəɹəʊ/Definition, CEFR level A1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
numThe cardinal number occurring before one and that denotes no quantity or amount at all, represented in Arabic numerals as 0.
nounThe numeric symbol that represents the cardinal number zero.
Sentence Examples
Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius, doesn't it?
The thermometer went down below zero.
The temperature dropped to zero degrees Celsius during the cold night.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The temperature dropped to ____ degrees outside, so all water froze solid.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The temperature dropped to ____ degrees earlier this morning, which is why everything was covered in several white ice today.
Word Origin & History
Collectively borrowed from Early Modern Spanish zero, Middle French zero, and (their etymon) Old Italian zero, from Medieval Latin zēphirum, from Arabic صِفْر (ṣifr, “nothing; cipher”), itself calqued from Sanskrit शून्य (śūnyá, “void; nothingness”). Doublet of cipher and chiffre. Cognate with Spanish cero and French zéro.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Last year, it scored 26 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index which ranks countries on a scale of zero to 100, with zero meaning “highly corrupt” and 100 signifying that a country is “very clean.”"
— 2024 July 22, Nimi Princewill, “Uganda’s President Museveni warns citizens they are ‘playing with fire’ over planned protests”, in CNN:
""A zero itself is nothing, but without a zero you cannot count anything. Therefore, a zero is something, yet zero."
These words of wisdom from the Dalai Lama might not have been in the minds of planners and engineers when designing new railway station platforms, but for several main line stations, zero is indeed something. Eight stations in the UK now operate a Platform 0 - from Cardiff to Kings Cross, Doncaster and Haymarket."
— 2025 May 14, Andy Comfort, “Holding out for a zero...”, in RAIL, number 1035, page 58:
"His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip — hence the name racetrack — and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros."
— 2007 September 11, John Markoff, “Redefining the Architecture of Memory”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 09 Nov 2020:
"Here is the formal definition: an autobiographical number is a number N such that the first digit of N counts how many zeroes are in N, the second digit counts how many ones are in N and so on. In our example, 1210 has 1 zero, 2 ones, 1 two and 0 threes."
— 2008 March 2, Tanya Khovanova, “Autobiographical Numbers”, in arXiv, page 1:
"This effectively allows switching on and off of the flow of current, so it is either conducting or not conducting, creating the binary system of zeroes and ones used in digital computers."
— 2024 January 4, Matthew Sparkes, “First working graphene semiconductor could lead to faster computers”, in New Scientist, retrieved 18 Jan 2024:
Explore More A1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The temperature dropped to ____ degrees outside, so all water froze solid.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The temperature dropped to ____ degrees earlier this morning, which is why everything was covered in several white ice today.