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Love-All: Why do tennis players say love and not zero? (Happy Valentine's Day)


Happy Valentine's Day! While people get chocolates, go on romantic dinner dates, spend a day with their love ones, have a magical day, etc. (I would have no clue what people do on Valentine's day.) We are here to talk about love. No, not that kind of love that you see in romantic comedies or in real life that makes us say "awww," but why 0 in tennis is called love. So sit back, eat some chocolates and continue reading to learn why.

The number zero is called love in tennis since it came from a word in french called l'oeuf which means an egg in the shape of a zero. Not just any egg, a goose egg. Over the years, people began to overuse the term and eventually people mispronounced the french word and all of sudden, you got love-all to represent 0-0 in the tennis scoring system.

Stevenson tennis playing preparing to hit a tennis ball
(photo by Wornden Ly)
There is also another theory that people uses the word "love" to show respect to the game and to the opponent. If you think about it, if we are teaching a new and/or young tennis player to keep score, we already are teaching them to respect the game and player and the beginnings of sportsmanship. After all, what would you rather say when you're losing "0-30" or "love-30" or vice versa to your opponent?

That's a brief history of why the tennis scoring system uses love as the number zero. Thanks for reading and Happy Valentine's everyone!
valentine's day scrabble pieces










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Comments

  1. YarFebruary 19, 2018 at 2:16 PM

    I have always wondered why it was called love. It seems pretty strange that they were saying 30-Egg when they started playing tennis. I guess its equivalent to saying "I got bageled" today.

    ReplyDelete
  2. wordFebruary 25, 2018 at 5:05 PM

    Glad you learned something and I think it's a lot better to say "love" than "egg."

    ReplyDelete
  3. ProfMarch 5, 2018 at 1:14 PM

    I always wondered about this as well. Never would have thought it had anything to do with eggs....thanks for the post!

    ReplyDelete

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