You’re probably wondering why bother learning nothing in English. The fact is there are many ways of saying nothing! For example, you could say, naught or nil. And even the Spanish nada has become popular in English usage.
It was all for naught.
Manchester beat Arsenal 2-nil.
I’ve got nada in my pocket.
My personal favorites are the nothing synonyms starting with “z”, such as zero, zilch and zip.
This work isn’t worth zip.
You’ve contributed zilch to the project.
Curiously, in tennis, love is used to refer to nothing (for example, 40-love). Supposedly this comes from the expression “to play for love of the game” which means playing for nothing. Tennis players mustn’t love this game so much, I guess!
Of course, it’s fun to exaggerate and say them all together!
You’ve done nothing, nada, nil, zilch, zip, zero, a big doughnut since I left.
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