love

From Proto-Indo-European lewbʰ- ("love, care, desire"), through Proto-Germanic lubō and Proto-West Germanic lubu, into Old English lufu. The noun passed through Middle English love, luve unchanged in substance, though the verb loven, luvien derived separately from Old English lufian via Proto-West Germanic lubōn.

The epistolary sense—"close of a letter"—arose presumably by truncation of "With love" or similar formulae. The native word eclipsed the Norman French import amour, borrowed into Middle English but now largely displaced.

Cognates survive across Germanic and beyond: Scots luve; Saterland Frisian ljo, ljoo, ljoof ("dear, sweet"), Ljoote, Ljoowe; West Frisian leaf ("friendly, kind, cordial"), leafde; Dutch lief, liefde; German lieb, Liebe; German Low German Leevde, Lieve; Luxembourgish léif, Léift; Vilamovian łiwa; Yiddish ליב (lib); Icelandic ljúfur; Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish ljuv; Gothic 𐌻𐌹𐌿𐍆𐍃 (liufs). The root extends to Albanian lyp ("to beg"), Russian любовь (ljubovʹ), Lithuanian liaupsė ("praise"), Latin libido ("desire, lust"), Polish lubić ("to like"), Persian آلفتن (âloftan, "to enamor"), and Sanskrit लोभ (lobha, "desire, greed").

The tennis score love arrives from the sixteenth-century notion that a player labouring without points is doing so "for love" — that is, for nothing, without prospect of material reward. The zero on the board thus carries a small philosophical sting: the competitor who has not yet scored is, by the logic of the term, playing for the purest of motives.

The alternative etymology, that the word descends from French l'œuf ("the egg"), has been abandoned. The resemblance of a zero to an egg is genuine enough — cricket has borrowed duck from "duck's egg," and American English records goose egg for the same figure — but the written record does not support this route for tennis. The l'œuf theory survives now only as a caution against etymologies too tidy to examine.