Love the Score

I think we can all remember learning how to score the game of tennis. Not only do I remember my mother walking me around the tennis court and explaining how tennis is scored, but also I have tried to explain scoring to hundreds of kids in tennis lessons. It’s pretty difficult at first, but once you get it, nothing seems more second nature.

Tennis definitely doesn’t seem to be scored in the most practical way—Love, 15, 30, 40. Where’d the whole scoring thing come from? Most tennis roots come from France (not surprising, since we know tennis was invented there). So why the crazy scoring? There seem to be two well-accepted theories.

Tennis, when first invented, was a game of royalty. Some say that the scoring was created to be confusing on purpose. The odd scoring system would confuse the common French population and discourage them from wanting to learn to play. Thus, tennis would remain an elite game for royalty only. I’m not so sure about this theory; I’m more inclined to agree with a second explanation.

The second theory says that old clocks were used as scoreboards. For every point scored, you would move the dial of the clock ahead a quarter turn. So, one point was fifteen, two points were thirty, and four points would have been forty-five. Over time, to simplify the terms, forty-five was shortened to only forty.

So that could be a couple of theories about the scoring, but where did “love”—meaning zero—originate? This also seems to have two origins. The word for egg in French is "l’oeuf," pronounced “loaf” as in a loaf of bread. Well, eggs to the French looked like zeros—which you can see with their oval shapes. With time “l’oeuf” transitioned to the more familiar English word “love.” So if we translated French to English, and the score was zero-zero, we would have said "egg-egg."

The second theory about using "love" for zero has to do again with the clock being used as the scoreboard. The word for hour in French is "l'heure." If a clock truly was used to keep score, it would make sense that zero was called "hour" or in French "l’heure." As the game transitioned to England, "l'heure" was changed to "love."

Join me tomorrow for the interesting conclusion about this confusing method of scoring.