The routes by which trade, encounters and learning reshaped English.
zero (n.)
Collection
Words That Travelled
Zero is nothing, written down. The word goes back to the Arabic sifr, empty, which was itself used to render the Sanskrit śūnya, empty—the name Indian mathematicians gave the mark that held an empty place.12
Europe took the word twice. One route latinised it as cifra, which gave English cipher; the other, through Fibonacci’s zephirum, gave Italian zefiro and then zero.123
So the two are the same word arriving by different roads. Cipher carried both senses into English: zero, in its older use, and a code.3
The total came to zero.