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Turn on the tennis this week and you will hear it within the first ten seconds. The umpire settles into the chair, the crowd goes quiet, and a voice says two words that make no sense at all.
Love all.
It means nobody has scored yet. Zero to zero. But nobody says zero. In tennis, zero is called love — and if you have ever wondered why is zero called love in tennis, here is the honest answer up front: nobody can prove it.
Not the dictionaries. Not the historians. Not the sport itself.
That sounds like a disappointing way to start. It isn’t. Because when you actually go looking, the explanation everyone repeats falls apart the moment you check it — and the one left standing says something far stranger than “zero.”
Why Is Zero Called Love in Tennis? Start With the Egg Story
Ask around and you will get the same answer almost every time. Love comes from the French word for egg, l’œuf, because an egg is shaped like a zero. English speakers heard l’œuf, could not manage the pronunciation, and it slowly softened into “love.”
It is a lovely story. It has one problem it cannot get past.
French speakers do not use l’œuf to mean zero. They say zéro. An egg is food; it has never been a score. So the theory asks us to believe that English players borrowed a French tennis term that French players themselves never used.
That is why the egg explanation is not taken seriously by most etymologists, including those behind the Oxford English Dictionary. There is no evidence trail behind it at all. It is a good-sounding guess that got repeated so often it started to sound like a fact.
Worth remembering the next time a very tidy explanation shows up without a source attached.
What “Love” Actually Meant Before It Meant Zero
Here is the part that usually gets left out.
Long before the word turned up on a tennis court, English already had the phrase for love. It meant doing something with no stakes on it — no money, no prize, nothing to win. You played for love, or you played for money. Those were the two options. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces that phrase back to the 1670s.
The scoring sense — love meaning a score of nothing — shows up later, around 1742.
Sit with the order of those two dates for a moment, because it quietly changes everything.
The word did not start out as a name for zero and then pick up a romantic flavour by accident. It went the other direction entirely. “Love” first described why you were playing. Only afterwards did it become the name of the score.
Which means that when the umpire says “love all,” the older meaning sitting underneath it is not really nothing to nothing. It is closer to: nothing is on the line yet, and you are here because you love this.
The Oxford English Dictionary lands on that same phrase — playing for love, without stakes wagered — as the root of the word. It is the best-supported explanation anyone has. It is still not proof. Nobody at the time was writing down why they picked the word, and that record simply does not exist.
Why “Nobody Knows” Is the Truthful Answer
It would be easy to finish there and say the mystery is solved. It would also be overstating it.
What can be said with confidence: the egg theory has no evidence behind it and a specific flaw it cannot survive. What can be said with real but lesser confidence: for love, meaning without stakes, is where the word most likely came from.
What cannot be said: which one is definitely right.
Other guesses have been floated for over a century — a Scots word that sounded similar, an origin somewhere further east. None of them has carried the day either.
And tennis does this more than once. The numbers are unexplained too.
The tidy story there is that a clock face was used to keep score: a quarter of the way, half, three-quarters, done — with forty-five shortened to forty simply because it was quicker to shout across a court. Good story. But the fifteen-thirty-forty-five scoring turns up in the record before clock faces carried minute markings at all, which makes the clock look like an explanation invented afterwards to tidy up a system that was already there.
So the sport carries a scoring system nobody can fully account for, and uses it anyway — every day, in every country, and nobody minds.
The One Thing About Tennis Scoring Nobody Disputes
Set the arguments aside, because underneath all of them sits something completely settled. It is also the strangest part.
Every single game begins at love.
Not usually. Every game, every set, every match, for every player who has ever walked onto a court. The best player alive and someone hitting on a public court on a Tuesday morning both start in precisely the same place. Love all.
You cannot bank yesterday’s points. Winning the last game does not let you begin the next one already ahead. There is no carry-over, no credit, no head start for the great player — which is part of what makes tennis such a brutally lonely sport to play. Whatever you built, you rebuild, from love, every time.
And if you win a game without giving away a single point, tennis does not call that a perfect game. It calls it a love game.
That arrangement is worth noticing, because almost nothing else in life is built that way.
Nearly everything else expects you to arrive with a score already on the board. The job wants the record. The room wants the credentials. Even the quiet running tally in your own head keeps track of what you have earned lately and where that leaves you standing — which is roughly what people are describing when they say they feel like a fraud in a room they actually earned. Start from nothing in that world and it feels like a deficit. Something to climb out of.
Tennis just calls it love and starts the point.
There is a very old idea, far older than the sport, that says a person’s standing works the same way — that love is the position you begin from rather than the prize you play toward. Not something assembled slowly out of a long enough run of good results. Something already in place before the first point, handed to the beginner and the champion in exactly the same amount. It is an idea most of us find surprisingly hard to accept about ourselves, even when we would grant it to anyone else without hesitating.
Whoever settled on that word for the starting position was almost certainly not thinking about any of this. That is part of what makes it worth noticing.
Back to the Court
The US Open runs through mid-September at Flushing Meadows in New York. Right now the grounds are in fan week and qualifying, with the main draw starting on 30 August. Somewhere in there, a few thousand times over, an umpire will open a game with those two words and not one person in the stadium will blink.
Now you know the most repeated explanation for it is almost certainly wrong, the better one points somewhere else entirely, and the sport has quietly never settled the question.
Every player who walks out there starts at love. Then they play.
It is not a bad way to begin anything.
Common Questions About Love and Tennis Scoring
Why is zero called love in tennis?
In tennis, a score of zero is called “love,” but the origin is not settled. The best-supported explanation, favoured by the Oxford English Dictionary, is that it comes from the older English phrase “for love,” meaning to play without stakes — no money on the game and nothing to win. That phrase is recorded from the 1670s, while the scoring sense of “love” appears later, around 1742. No document survives explaining the choice directly, so the word’s origin remains probable rather than proven.
Does “love” in tennis come from the French word l’œuf?
Almost certainly not. The popular story claims English speakers mispronounced l’œuf, French for “egg,” because an egg resembles a zero. The problem is that French speakers do not use l’œuf to mean zero — they use zéro. There is no evidence trail supporting the egg theory, and most etymologists, including those behind the Oxford English Dictionary, do not accept it.
What is a love game in tennis?
A love game is a game won without the opponent scoring a single point, leaving the loser on zero. Because zero is called love in tennis, that game is described as a “love game.” The same wording extends to a “love set,” meaning a set won six games to none.
Why does tennis score 15, 30 and 40?
Nobody knows for certain. The most repeated explanation is that a clock face was used to track points — a quarter, a half, three-quarters — with forty-five shortened to forty because it was faster to call out. That explanation runs into a difficulty: the fifteen-thirty-forty-five scoring appears in the historical record before clock faces carried minute markings, which suggests the clock story was invented afterwards to explain a system that already existed.
Does every tennis game start at love?
Yes. Every tennis game begins at love — zero points for both players — announced by the umpire as “love all.” There is no carry-over between games. Points won in a previous game do not transfer, so both players start each new game from the same position no matter what the score is in the set or the match.
What Do You Think?
If you could redesign the scoring in any sport, which one would you fix first — and would you keep a word as odd as “love” in it, or make everything plain and numbered? Tell us in the comments below.
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Been repeating the egg thing my whole life. Turns out French speakers never used l’œuf to mean zero — they say zéro. The real answer is stranger and better: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/sports-and-faith/why-is-zero-called-love-in-tennis/
Tennis fact that reorganised my brain today: “love” meant playing for no stakes about seventy years before it ever meant a score of nothing. So “love all” never really meant nothing to nothing. It meant nothing is on the line yet, and you are here because you love this. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/sports-and-faith/why-is-zero-called-love-in-tennis/
Nobody can prove why zero is called love in tennis. Not the dictionaries, not the historians, not the sport. And yet every game on earth still starts there. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/sports-and-faith/why-is-zero-called-love-in-tennis/
