Zero arrived in English through Arabic and Italian
Zero names an empty quantity and the additive identity: adding it changes nothing, while multiplying by it yields zero. As a digit it holds empty places in decimal writing. English borrowed zero via French and Italian forms of Arabic sifr.
The positional zero used today came from Indian mathematics, reached Europe through medieval Islamic scholars and was popularised by Fibonacci, who grew up in North Africa and wrote it as zephyrum. The Sanskrit śūnya was translated by the Arabic ṣifr, which had meant "empty" before Islam; Italian turned it into zefiro, perhaps nudged by the existing word for the west wind, and Venetian shortened that to zevero and then zero. English first used the loanword in 1598. Cipher, aught and ought are older English names.
Other civilisations got close. An Egyptian court scribe around 1770 BC marked balanced food accounts with the nfr hieroglyph, which Egyptologist Alan Gardiner read as a zero sign. Babylonian base-60 numbers left a gap for an empty place, a scribe at Kish used three hooks, and by 300 BC two slanted wedges served as a placeholder, though never as a number on its own. In the Americas the Long Count calendar needed a zero; its earliest dated example, on a stela at Chiapa de Corzo, reads 36 BC, and the idea may have begun with the Olmecs before the Maya adopted it. Inca quipus showed zero as a missing knot.
Mathematically, zero leaves any number unchanged when added, turns every product to zero and cannot be divided by, since nothing multiplied by it gives one. It is even, neither prime nor composite, neither positive nor negative. Any nonzero number raised to the zeroth power is one, the empty product is one, and so 0! equals one, while 0/0 is an indeterminate form that calculus resolves by other methods such as l'Hôpital's rule. In set theory zero counts the empty set and is the smallest ordinal.
Spoken zero takes many shapes: "oh" in phone numbers and years like nineteen oh seven, "nil" in British football, "love" in tennis, possibly from the French for egg, and "duck" in cricket, short for duck's egg.
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