Grandma Girl here, I'm Nion Fog Fog Fog, Your Friendly Guide to the English

language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today, we'll talk about the numbers zero

and how to write better email messages.

Zero is a weird number. How can it even be a number when it represents nothing? Even its origin is tricky because the first known use of zero as a number in mathematics was in ancient India, but

the earlier Babylonians and the Mayans used placeholder values that were kind of like zero. But whether it seems like a number or not, it is.

And in grammatical terms, even though it represents absolutely nothing,

we treat it as plural. It's a whole lot of nothing. So if it's

been a particularly bad week you write in your diary that it's been zero days since

you cried at work, not zero day, if you even care about grammar at that point.

Now the spelling I'm going to tell you to use for the plural noun is zerosos without an e zeros

but true to form zero is a weird one here too

so it's also not that simple

garners modern English usage says the plural is

zeros without an e, but the Oxford English Dictionary says the plural is

zeros with an e zer-E-R-O-E-S.

Merriam Webster says it can be either,

so I thought it might be a difference between British

and American English.

But a Google N-Ggram search limited to British English shows

zeros without the E, kicking the other forms booty. It's clearly the dominant

...