nouns - What is the plural form of "zero"?


I tried looking on Google, but there are some fairly contradictory results.


I thought I'd ask you guys so we could get an authoritative answer on the subject!



Answer



Both zeros and zeroes are acceptable, see e.g. Merriam-Webster, Wiktionary or TheFreeDictionary.


The usage stats from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) look as follows:


              COCA   BNC

zeros          312   132    
zeroes.[n]     106     5

So in practice zeros is preferred in the US and even more so in the UK, though citations for zeroes include such prominent examples as Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. (Mr Hawking is British, but the book was first published by an American publishing house.) The oldest citation for zeroes in the BNC is from 1978. The Corpus of Historical American English has six citations that are even older, the oldest one being from 1914.


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