�Love is one of life�s most powerful words.  Love endures all, hopes all, bears all.  Love is believing, sharing and dreaming.  Love is honesty, love is companionship.  Love is the attainment of life�s greatest inspiration and so much more (Barton).�  However, in the game of tennis, the word love represents when a player has nothing, zero points.  How is it then that love goes from meaning everything, to meaning nothing?

      It has been said that love meaning nothing points back to the days in which tennis was played as a courtship ritual.  If one player bested the other in the game, they could extend their hand to their partner and say, �well at least you have love.� This however was found to be untrue.  Another theory of love meaning nothing is that tennis players used the endearment form of love to soften the blow of the opponent having a low score (and also to tease the opponent): �That�s 15, Love.�  Eventually, love came to mean zero points rather than just a low score for the losing side (Clougherty).  This was also found to be untrue.  My grandfather always said that love means nothing in tennis because love makes losers out of all of us, however, this is another falsehood of why love means nothing.

      The real reason, people say, why love means nothing points back to when the French developed tennis in the early 1600�s. They phrased the score of nothing as �l�oeuf,� which in French, means, �egg.�  The French used the word �egg� instead of �zero� because of King Louis XII.  He popularized the phrase during his matches as good-humored trash talking of his opponents. He would say his opponents would have �l�oeuf,� much the same way we would say �goose egg�.  Over the years, English speaking tennis fans turned �l�oeuf� into its nearest homonymic equivalent, or �love� (Clougherty).

     A popular phrase often heard today is to �play for love is to play for nothing.�  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, �to play for love,� means to play without stakes, or for nothing.  It is applied to the practice of playing a competitive game for the pleasure of playing, and nothing else (�Love� OED). This may also be why love means nothing.

      Although love is used in many different ways, the love we are most familiar with is the endearment form of love.  Although dictionaries and many people have tried, the endearment form of love cannot be entirely defined.  This is true because love means something different to each and every person who encounters it.  It is something people search their lives to find the meaning for and sometimes never do.

      Love is a word that has people boggled.  Whether using it as a score in tennis, or using it in wedding vows, love is defined very differently, as opposites.  One may never know the true meaning of the word love in any sense.  All we will know is that which we are taught (love meaning nothing) and that which we are given (love meaning everything).