What does love mean in tennis, and why 15, 30, 40?

Love means zero in tennis. A score of 30–love means the server has won two points and the receiver none. It isn't an abbreviation of anything: English games have used love for "no score" since the 1700s.

What does love mean in tennis

Love replaces zero anywhere a score is called. The server's score comes first, so "15–love" means the server leads and "love–30" means the receiver does. From there the sequence runs 15, 30, 40, game.

The meaning doesn't shift with context. A love game is a game won without conceding a point. A set won 6–0 is called "six–love," though most players just say bagel. "Love all" is 0–0 at the start of a game.

One exception is worth knowing. The traditional calls vanish inside a tiebreak, where points are ordinary numbers, so you'll hear "one–zero," not "15–love," until someone reaches seven with a two-point margin. If the surrounding structure is fuzzy, the full tennis scoring rules lay out games, sets, and match formats in order.

Why is it called love in tennis? Two competing stories

Two explanations get repeated courtside, and they don't agree.

The French one: zero is oval, an egg is oval, and l'œuf, "the egg," got mangled by English speakers into "love."

The English one: "to play for love" has meant to play for nothing, with no money at stake, since the 1600s. A player with no points has nothing.

	The l'œuf (egg) theory	The "playing for love" theory
The claim	l'œuf = egg = the oval nought	for love = for free, no stakes
Point in its favor	The shapes match, and tennis is French in origin	"For love" meaning "for nothing" is attested in English from the 1670s
Point against it	No record of French players calling a score of nothing an egg; the word is zéro	Doesn't explain why the sense stuck to racket sports
Dictionary status	Listed as a suggestion, not as evidence	Treated as the likelier route

The problem for the egg is that missing record. The point for the other side is that love means zero well outside tennis, since whist and later bridge call 0–0 "love all" too, which is hard to explain as a borrowed French pun. Etymology dictionaries date the "no score" sense in English to the 1740s.

Neither is proven, and honest sources say so. For settling a courtside argument, though: the egg is the folk etymology, not the accepted one.

Why is tennis scored 15, 30, 40 instead of 1, 2, 3?

Because the sequence was inherited, not designed. It comes from jeu de paume, the French handball game tennis grew out of; the name means "game of the palm," from the years before rackets. The numbers were already in use in the 1400s. A 1435 ballad by Charles d'Orléans, written during his long imprisonment in England after Agincourt, scores a rally at forty-five.

The popular explanation is the clock face: a quarter turn of the hand for 15, then 30, then 45, then 60 for game. It's tidy, and it's probably backwards. Clocks of that era generally carried a single hand for the hour, and minute hands became common only after the pendulum clock arrived in the mid-1600s, two centuries after those scores appear in writing. The clock explains the scoring the way a mnemonic explains a fact, afterward.

Two rival theories circulate. One ties the numbers to betting stakes counted in units of 15, since jeu de paume was gambled on heavily. The other has the point winner advancing 15 feet toward the net, twice, then only 10 feet the third time, because by then he had run out of court. Both sound plausible. Neither is documented.

How 45 became 40

The shortening happened in the calling, not in a rulebook. Quarante-cinq is slower to shout than quarante, and the short form won. The neat side effect is that 40 leaves room on the old 60-point frame, with advantage at 50 and game at 60, though whether that was the cause or a coincidence nobody can show. The outcome is certain enough: from 40–40 a player needs a two-point margin, which is where deuce and advantage take over. Not every format keeps it. ATP and WTA doubles play a single deciding point at deuce, and NCAA college matches do the same.

Deuce is another survivor of the same era, from the French deux, the two points still needed. Plenty of other tennis terms trace back the same way, love among them.

The 15–30–40 sequence is the one thing a scoring app has to reproduce exactly, since a single wrong call cascades through the rest of the game. Tennis Scoreboard is a tennis scoreboard app for iPhone and Apple Watch that tracks match scores, so the count stays right while you're still learning where 40 sits.

FAQ

Why is it called love in tennis and not zero?

Most likely because "playing for love" meant playing for nothing, with no stakes riding on the result, and a player on love has nothing. The rival story, that it comes from the French l'œuf for the egg-shaped nought, is the popular one but the weaker one: French for a score of nothing is zéro, and no record shows players calling it an egg.

What is a love game in tennis?

A game the opponent loses without winning a point: four straight points, called 15–love, 30–love, 40–love, game. A set won 6–0 is won at love too, usually described as a bagel. When the returner is the one who wins the game, commentators call it a break to love.

Who invented tennis scoring?

Nobody in particular. The 15–30–40 sequence came out of jeu de paume in medieval France and was already written down in the 1400s. The All England Club's 1877 rules for lawn tennis adopted that count rather than inventing a new one. The tiebreak is the major later addition, first used at a Grand Slam at the 1970 US Open.

What does 40–love mean?

The server has won three points and the receiver none, so the server holds three game points in a row. It's the strongest position in a game short of winning it. A receiver who claws back to 40–40 has erased all three and forced deuce, where the game restarts as a two-point race.