It took a long time for mathematicians to come to agreement that zero was in fact a number.

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To a small extent the confusion still exists. I heard a comedian say that because zero is a number it was factual for him to claim to have dated a number of supermodels.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans hadn’t figured it out. There’s no Roman numeral for zero.

Europeans finally got clued-in from Arab mathematicians and when Europeans realized the superiority of the Arabic numeral system they took to it with religious zeal.

I’m not kidding. Back in the tenth century one of the important publicists for this fancy new way of counting was Gerbert of Aurillac who became Pope Sylvester II.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the etymology of the word zero traces back to an Arabic word cifr.

It took English a while longer to adopt this word. Zero appears first as an English word only four hundred years ago; well into the time when William Shakespeare was at the height of his powers.

Before that the equivalent English word was nought.

When English finally did adopt the word zero it is unclear whether we were copying the French or the Italians both of whom already had the word.

But the confusion around the value of zero actually means that English had adopted the word much earlier; but with a different meaning.

Today we think of the word cipher as meaning the code by which computers encrypt our passwords and credit card numbers.

This meaning actually evolved based on the question as to whether zero is a number or not.

Cipher first appeared in English 200 years before the word zero but came from that same Arabic cifr root.

At first it meant “zero.”

The problem was what the concept of zero meant. This thing the Arabs called cifr seemed to Europeans to be a placeholder for something that wasn’t actually there.

That’s why cipher means “code.” You’re taking your password or credit card number and replacing it with a series of placeholders that represent the numbers that aren’t there.