〇 | líng

In Mandarin Chinese, 〇 (Pinyin: líng 🔊) is a word for number zero.

In AD 690, Wu Zetian (624—705), the only Empress Regnant in the history of China, adopted a number of new characters, one of which was 〇. Originally, it was meant to replace the unwieldy character 星 “star”. After the Empress’s death, the new characters fell into disuse. In 1247, Qin Jiushao (ca. 1202—1261) found a new job for 〇. It was introduced as the symbol for zero in his work 數書九章 (Shùshū Jiǔzhāng, “Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections”). Another hanzi with the same meaning, 零, is mainly used for financial purposes.

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0 | zero

Probably the first documented use of a number zero in the Old World was by Claudius Ptolemy in the Almagest (ca. 130 AD), although in the Americas the concept and symbol for zero existed much earlier.

Ptolemy employed the symbol ο̄ (“Hellenistic zero”) within a Babylonian sexagesimal numeral system. The oldest known mention of zero and the decimal positional system are found in the Jainist cosmological text Lokavibhāga (AD 458). By the 11^th century, the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, complete with zero, reached Europe.

In my handwriting, I almost always write this digit as a slashed zero, 0.

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