“When the Arabs adopted Indian numerals and the zero, they called the latter sifr, meaning ‘empty’, a plain translation of the Sanskrit shunya. . . .

 When the concept of zero arrived in Eurpoe, the Arabic word was assimilated to a hear-homophone in Latin, zephyrus, meaning ‘the west wind’ and, by rather convenient extension, a mere breath of wind, a light breeze, or–almost–nothing.In his Liber  Abaci, Fibonacci (Leonard of Pisa) used the term zephirum, and the term remained in use in that form until the fifteenth century. . . .

 [I]t was Fibonacci’s term . . . which gave rise to the modern name of zero, by way of the Italian zefiro (zero is just a contraction of zefiro, in Venetian dialect). . . . There is absolutely no doubt that zero owes its spread to French (zero) and Spanish (cero) (and later on to English and other languages) to the enormous prestige that Italian scholarship acquired in the sixteenth century.”

 —Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.