[Ads-l] "love" (tennis etymythology)

[Ben Zimmer]

For my Wall Street Journal column this week, I'm looking into the popular
etymythology for "love" as a score of no points in tennis. The commonly
told story is that it's an Anglicization of French "l'œuf" because a zero
is shaped like an egg. This has proved to be a sturdy canard despite zero
evidence. I'm interested in how the story first circulated, and the
earliest version I've found is from 1887.

---
https://books.google.com/books?id=UUADAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA61
Scottish Notes & Queries, Sept. 1887, p. 61, col. 1
THE SCORING TERM "LOVE." -- I observe an answer to the query in your first
number as to the origin of this term; but neither of the alternative
suggestions seems to me satisfactory. I venture, with considerable
confidence, to suggest that the word "Love," used both in billiards and
lawn tennis, when no score had been made, is simply the French "l'œuf," the
egg. My reasons for this opinion are: -- 1. The other English terms used in
billiards -- the older of the two -- are, in several instances, derived
from the French. Billiard, Fr. billard; cue, Fr. queue; pool, Fr. poule
(hen), used where all the balls, the whole nest of eggs, come into play. 2.
The word "l'oeuf" -- the egg -- might well be the figurative expression for
a score amounting to nothing, generally represented by a round O, not
unlike an egg. 3. If, as I have been informed, "no score" in another game
-- cricket -- is named "a duck's egg," there is here a reverting in English
to the original meaning of the French "l'œuf," which markers and others
spell and pronounce "love." ALEX. D. MILNE.
---

This theory was later popularized in the article "Sporting Terms in Common
Speech" by Justice Phillimore in _The Monthly Review_, Vol. 25 (Nov. 1906),
p. 82:

https://books.google.com/books?id=O3NPAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA82

...and later still in _Word Ways: A Study of Our Living Language_ by Jerome
C. Hixson and I. Colodny (1939), p. 127:

https://archive.org/details/wordwaysstudyofo0000hixs/page/126/mode/2up

Hixson & Colodny are cited in _American Notes & Queries_ 2 (1963) pp. 8-9,
in turn cited in the OED3 entry for "love."

Can anyone find any attestations of the "l'œuf" story before 1887?

--bgz

PS: _Word Ways_ co-author Isidor Omar Colodny was also the editor of the
Los Angeles-based magazine _Words_, notable for hosting Dwight Bolinger's
column "The Living Language" before H.L. Mencken convinced Bolinger to
bring his talents to _American Speech_, where the feature was rechristened
"Among the New Words." See Zimmer et al., "Seventy-Five Years Among the New
Words," _AmSp_ 91(4) (Nov. 2016), pp. 472ff for more.

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