0

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Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter ‘O’ (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom Ø is a letter, curse this arrangement). (Interestingly, the slashed zero long predates computers; Florian Cajori's monumental A History of Mathematical Notations notes that it was used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse this arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays a zero with a reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered letter O as an unbroken oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper right and lower left. And yet another convention common on early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O (this was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how to draw ASCII characters, but the final standard changed the distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left corner). Are we sufficiently confused yet?

Look up 0 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

0 may refer to:

• 0 (number), the integer between −1 and +1
• 0 (year), a year used in some calendar systems
• Slashed zero, a glyph used to distinguish the numeral 0 from the letter O
• 0 or #0, pseudonym of American musician Sid Wilson, when performing with the band Slipknot

See also

• Zero (disambiguation)
• O, a letter of the Latin alphabet
• Ø, a letter of several Scandinavian alphabets
• ∅, the empty set
• 0#, the zero sharp set
• Φ, the Greek letter phi
• Θ, the Greek letter theta
• ⌀, the diameter symbol

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