Mysteries of vernacular: Zero - Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel

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.