Hearing the point system in tennis is: love, 15, 30, then 40. It’s sure to draw sneers from anyone new to the sport. Normally they will ask why the point value changed from 15 to 10, but the truth is that it is better to accept that this is the reality of tennis.
Tennis has been scored much the same way since it was introduced in Victorian England, so it’s safe to say that the game’s unusual scoring system, including the use of the word “love” instead of zero or nothing, is here to stay.
tennis scoring system
Tennis’s unusual scoring system dates back to the history of the game, although there were occasional differences. One of the earliest scoring systems used 15, 30, and later 45 points. Increments of 15 make a bit more sense than the modern system. Some have hypothesized that this came from the minutes on a clock. However, that explanation doesn’t explain why the modern game uses 40 instead of 45.
All sports have their own set of jargon terms that develop over the years, and tennis is no different. This is believed to be the reason the scoring system dropped 5 points, because saying “forty” is marginally faster than saying “forty-five”.
This change did nothing more than make things a bit more confusing. However, tennis is a bit like the world in that point values don’t matter as they don’t change the system. It has almost always been possible to simplify it to 0, 1, 2 and 3.
love equals zero points
There are a few different explanations as to why the word love is used in tennis instead of zero or nothing. It is where both players start a game and where the less experienced players often stay. That’s why one explanation is that someone with zero points is playing for.”the love of the game«.
Another explanation goes back to the early roots of the game in France. There is a vowel in French with no exact equivalent in English, known as l’œuf. However, the best approximation is that l’œuf could be pronounced in English as something like lerf or luff. Also, the French word œuf means egg. Since eggs resemble the number zero, it is believed that the French may have used l’œuf to mean zero.
It’s another example of players in a sport developing a unique set of jargon or shorthand terms. Even today, the termchicken egg» is a common way of saying that a player has no points. When this sport crossed the English Channel, English ears heard l’œuf as love, and simply never bothered to change it.