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How did the Sanskrit word sunya become related to the words cipher and zero?
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numerals and numeral systems
Examples of ancient symbols for the numbers 1 and 10.
The Sanskrit word shunya, which means "void" or "empty," is the etymological ancestor of both "cipher" and "zero."
In the 7th century, the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta was the first to treat shunya as a number in its own right, defining rules for its use in arithmetic. As these mathematical concepts spread from India to the Islamic world, the word was translated into Arabic as sifr, meaning "empty" or "nothing."1
When these Hindu-Arabic numerals were introduced to Europe in the Middle Ages, the Arabic sifr evolved into two distinct terms:
- Cipher: Derived directly from the Latinized version of sifr (cifra), this term was used to describe the symbol for zero and, by extension, came to refer to secret codes or a person of no importance.2
- Zero: This term evolved through the Italian zefiro, which was a corruption of sifr, eventually shortening to zero as it became the standard term for the number denoting the absence of quantity.1