sports
Tennis has one of the quirkiest scoring systems in sport, and its word for a zero score has long puzzled newcomers to the game.
The accepted origin traces 'love' to an older English phrase describing playing 'for love,' meaning purely for enjoyment rather than money or stakes. A player with zero points had nothing tangible to show yet, so they were, in a sense, playing simply for love of the game, and the phrase for a scoreless position stuck.
An early tennis champion literally named Love isn't the accepted explanation and appears invented. The popular legend linking 'love' to the French word for egg, l'oeuf, resembling a zero, is charming but historians consider 'playing for love' more credible.
Tennis scoring has other quirky leftovers too, like counting 15, 30, 40 instead of 1, 2, 3, a system some link to old clock faces, showing much of the sport's terminology grew organically rather than by design.
sports
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