Zero
Zero stands for nothing. If you have zero ice cream cones, then you have
none at all.
It may seem very silly to have a numeral for something that isn’t there,
but the numeral 0 is really very important. The 0 is a placeholder. It
shows us how much the other numerals stand for in a number. That’s how
we know that 10 means ten and 100 means one hundred.
There has always been nothing, but there hasn’t always been a zero. The
idea of having a numeral that stands for nothing was probably invented
in India. The Arabs, who borrowed the idea and brought it to Europe,
called the numeral sifr, which means “empty.”
People in Europe began to use the symbol 0 about a thousand years ago.
They changed its name to zero. We still use the Arab word sifr, but we
spell it cipher (SY fuhr). And for us, cipher means zero or any
numeral.
