Numerals · a Light

Zero and cipher are one word borrowed twice

The Indian mathematicians who made place value work called the empty column shunya, meaning void. Arabic translators rendered that as sifr, meaning empty. When the system moved into Latin, sifr was written down two ways, as zephirum and as cifra. Zephirum became the Italian zefiro and then zero. Cifra became the French chiffre and the English cipher, which first meant zero, then meant any digit at all, and then, because the new figures looked like a code to people who could not read them, came to mean a secret code. So a cipher is a zero, a zero is an emptiness, and the English word for a person who counts for nothing is the Sanskrit word for the void, carried west in Arabic.

Sanskrit to Arabic to Latin · one word's route