Tennis Scoring System: The Odd 15, 30, 40

If you’re new to tennis, then you must be wondering who invented the tennis scoring system—and why it’s so odd. Even tennis veterans are befuddled by the strange scoring system. In an interview, Andre Agassi was asked about why the points were named that way. His humorous reply was that the system was invented “to cause frustration to those who play tennis.”Indeed, for many players, it’s a mystery they will never understand. The practical approach would be to simply learn the scoring rules and move on instead of stopping to wonder how the rules got that way.

Tennis historians cannot pinpoint exactly how and when the wording was used, though there are several theories. The 15, 30, and 40 scores are said to have originated from medieval French. Theory has it that a clock face was used on court; a quarter move of the hand denoted a score of 15, 30, and 45. The game was over when the hand moved to 60.

In the world of tennis, ‘love’ is the term for zero—a term that is also attributed to medieval French. The word ‘l’oeuf’in French means egg—which looks like a zero. Tennis historians theorize that English mispronunciations eventually corrupted the word and it thus became ‘love.’Oddly enough, ‘love’ is not used at all in French tennis matches. They use zero.

Linguists also theorize that ‘love’ comes the Dutch word ‘lof,’ which means honor. The basis of this theory is a 16th-century political song that describes a battle between the French and Antwerp in terms of a tennis game, differentiating those who play for ‘lof’ and those who wager. Incidentally, the word ‘tennis’ is believed to be a corruption of the word ‘tenez’ which means take heed. The umpire shouted this word at the beginning of the match back in the day.