means The number that represents nothing — no quantity, no amount — and serves as the placeholder that makes our whole counting system possible.

from From Arabic 'sifr' meaning 'empty' or 'nothing,' which itself translated the Sanskrit 'shunya,' the Indian concept of emptiness or void where the idea of zero as a number truly took root. 'Sifr' traveled into Medieval Latin as 'zephirum,' then through Italian 'zefiro' it was shortened to 'zero.' That same Arabic 'sifr' also gave us the word 'cipher' — a reminder of an age when this empty little circle was treated as a mysterious code, even an instrument of fraud, which is part of why some European authorities distrusted it.