Play a game of tennis or simply watch a match from the stands (or your couch), and you’ll quickly discover that the sport has a language all its own—and some of it can be quite confusing.
A player can be down love-40 without romance entering the picture. A match can end in a walkover even though nobody walks anywhere. And a player can be seeded despite the distinct lack of gardening on the court. Then there are deuces, lets, bagels and breadsticks: terms that can leave newcomers wondering if they’re at a match or a bakery. Even if you’re familiar with these words, have you ever wondered why we use them—or where they came from in the first place?
With the 2026 U.S. Open just around the corner (Fan Week kicks off Aug. 23, and main-draw singles play begins Aug. 30), there’s no better time to decode some of tennis’s most head-scratching lingo.
To serve up some answers, I spoke with language expert Martha Barnette, longtime co-host of A Way with Words, who has spent years digging into the origins of the words and phrases we use every day. So grab your imaginary racket, and let’s take a swing at some tennis terminology.
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Love
What it means: Zero points
If a player hasn’t scored a point, their score is not zero but love. As for why zero is called love, that’s where things get murky.
You may have heard the theory that love comes from the French word l’œuf, meaning “egg,” because a zero looks like an egg. It’s an appealing story—and Barnette admits it’s “a charming, picturesque word origin.” There’s just one problem: “It’s one of those that’s almost too good to be true,” she says. “In fact, it probably is too good to be true.”
According to Barnette, “We just don’t have any evidence that love comes from the French word for egg.” In fact, if you attend a tennis match in France, she notes, “they just say zéro.” (Yep, zero.)
So where did love come from? Barnette suggests that it may have something to do with the idea of playing “for the love of the game.” In other words, playing even when you have no points or money at stake. But even that is only a theory.
15, 30, 40
What they mean: The first three point values in a standard tennis game: 15 for one point, 30 for two and 40 for three
And yes, this is probably the moment when a tennis newbie asks the obvious question: Um, why not 1, 2 and 3? Barnette says nobody has a definitive answer.
“We do know that this system goes back to very early versions of tennis in medieval France,” she says. Early records show scores of 15, 30 and 45, with 45 later becoming 40, and the strange scoring system has puzzled people for centuries. Barnette points to a 16th-century Flemish writer who questioned the practice: “Why is not one point given for one stroke and two for two strokes?”
One of the most popular explanations connects the scoring to the face of a clock: 15, 30, 45 and then 60, or game. But Barnette says etymologists have found problems with that theory. For starters, clocks displaying minutes developed relatively late compared with tennis, creating a chronology problem.
Another theory is that the unusual scoring comes from jeu de paume, an earlier French game in which players used their hands to hit the ball. According to this explanation, players moved 15 feet closer to the net after the first point, another 15 feet after the second, and 10 feet after the third—creating the 15–30–40 progression used in tennis today.
Still other theories connect the numbers to medieval numerical conventions or to the markings and dimensions of the court. That uncertainty is part of what makes etymology so fascinating. As Barnette puts it, an expert sometimes has to be “a party pooper” when a great story turns out not to be true. “People get really creative,” Barnette says. “But nobody’s come up with the real story.”
Deuce
What it means: A tie at 40–40, after which a player must win two consecutive points to win the game
Once a tennis game reaches deuce, winning one point isn’t enough. A player who wins the next point gets advantage; if that same player wins the following point, the game is over. If the opponent wins that following point, however, the score returns to deuce.
The word itself has a decidedly French connection, Barnette explains. Deuce comes from the French deux, meaning “two.” And the number makes sense: Once you’re at deuce, you need two points in a row to win the game. “If you lose that point,” Barnette adds, “then you go back.”
The terminology provides a reminder of tennis’s French roots. Early versions of the game were played in France, and the sport’s vocabulary contains plenty of French influence. Interestingly, though, a French tennis umpire doesn’t actually say deuce when the score reaches 40–40. Barnette recalls hearing égalité, meaning “equality,” at the French Open.
Grand Slam
What it means: A Grand Slam is the achievement of winning all four major tournaments—the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open—in the same calendar year; it can also refer to any one of those major competitions.
“Originally, Grand Slam was a card-playing term,” Barnette explains. It referred to winning all the tricks in a hand and dates to at least the early 1800s.
The phrase was eventually borrowed into sports, and tennis picked it up in 1933. That year, Australian player Jack Crawford had won the Australian and French championships and Wimbledon and was going for the U.S. title. He ultimately lost, but “while the suspense was building, sportswriters appropriated the term Grand Slam because he would be winning all the tricks, so to speak,” Barnette says.
The term stuck; five years later, American Don Budge became the first player to win all four major championships in a single calendar year. FYI: Winning four majors consecutively across two calendar years is generally called a non-calendar-year Grand Slam.
Walkover
What it means: When a player advances because an opponent withdraws before the match begins
There’s something delightfully literal about walkover, but this expression also comes from another sport.
“Walkover is borrowed from horse racing,” Barnette explains. Historically, if only one horse remained in a race, that horse still had to “walk over the entire course to claim the victory.” The term came to describe a contest won without opposition, even though the remaining competitor still had to go through the motions of completing the event.
Tennis uses the word in a similar way: If an opponent withdraws before the match begins, the other player receives a walkover and advances without playing. Barnette points out that this is part of a larger pattern in tennis vocabulary. “So many of these terms are borrowed from other sports,” she says, “or have that French influence because, of course, that’s where the early versions of tennis were played.”
Ace
What it means: A serve that lands “in” and isn’t touched by the receiver
An ace is one of the few tennis terms that seems almost perfectly suited to its meaning: It describes a serve so effective that the opponent can’t even get a racket on it.
The word ace dates to Middle English, when it referred to the one-pip (dot) side of a die and later to the playing card. Its sporting meaning developed over time; the sense of an ace as a point in racket sports dates to the 19th century, while the specific meaning of an unreturnable tennis serve appears by 1871, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
“An ace in a deck of cards is the highest value, the most powerful card,” Barnette explains. In tennis, that same idea of superiority applies to the serve: An ace is the most powerful kind of shot because “it’s completely unreturnable.”
That association with excellence eventually carried into everyday English; you can have an ace up your sleeve, be an ace reporter or ace a test.
Seed
What it means: The position of a player who is ranked and placed in a tournament draw in a way designed to keep the strongest players from meeting in the earliest rounds
This tennis term comes from gardening. No, really.
Tournament organizers don’t want all the strongest players meeting in the first round and knocking each other out immediately. Instead, top players are distributed throughout the draw so they’re more likely to face one another in later rounds. “It’s figuratively scattering seeds in different places,” Barnette explains.
In tennis, seed was being used as a verb by the late 19th century, reflecting the idea of “spreading” strong players throughout a tournament draw rather than clustering them together. The sporting use dates to at least 1898, while the noun seed in this sense is documented by 1931, according to the OED.
The metaphor is a fitting one: Just as seeds are planted in different places, the tournament’s top players are strategically spread throughout the draw. If the favorites keep winning, they’ll eventually meet later in the tournament, when the stakes—and the excitement—are higher.
Note: A seed isn’t the same thing as a player’s world ranking. Rankings help determine seeding, but a tournament seed is a separate designation.
Let
What it means: A serve or point that is replayed rather than counted
The most familiar example is a serve that clips the net but still lands in the correct service box. That’s a let, and the server gets another try.
But the word has an easily overlooked history. Barnette notes that English has two definitions for let: one from the Old English lǣtan, meaning “to allow or permit,” and another meaning “to obstruct or hinder.”
“The obstructing one, as in when a serve hits the net, comes from Old English lettan, meaning ‘to hinder, delay, prevent,’” she explains. That second meaning survives in the legal phrase “without let or hindrance.”
In tennis, the idea is just as literal: The serve was hindered, so it’s replayed.
Bagel and breadstick
What they mean: A bagel is a 6–0 set; a breadstick is a 6–1 set
Finally, some tennis vocabulary that is just as silly as it sounds.
A 6–0 set is called a bagel because the zero resembles the round shape of a bagel. A bagel means a player won a set without dropping a single game. If a player loses 6–0, 6–0, they’ve been double bageled.
A 6–1 set, meanwhile, can be called a breadstick, presumably because the number one resembles the long, thin shape of that particular baked good.
These are informal terms rather than official tennis terminology, but they’re part of the playful language fans have developed around the sport.
Wild card
What it means: A tournament entry awarded to a player who wouldn’t otherwise qualify through the usual route
“In card games, a wild card, like the Joker, isn’t stuck with its ordinary value,” Barnette says. It can stand in for something else.
Tennis uses that same idea for a player who gets into a tournament outside the normal qualification process. Maybe it’s a returning champion (looking at you, Serena). Maybe it’s a hometown favorite. Maybe it’s a promising young player the tournament organizers want fans to see.
“If you have a player you really want in this tournament,” Barnette says, “and maybe they haven’t gone through all the different usual ways to get in, but there’s something special about them … then you’re gonna give them a wild card.”
The result is exactly what the phrase suggests: an unexpected element gets added to the mix.
The bottom line
Tennis vocabulary is more than a collection of strange and colorful terms. It’s a record of how the game has evolved—and how the language around it has traveled, changed and stuck.
As the U.S. Open gets underway, listen a little differently to the language of the game. From love to let to deuce, every term has a story—and together, they’re part of what makes tennis so fascinating.
Sources:
- Martha Barnette, language expert, co-host of A Way with Words and author of Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland; phone interview, Aug. 11, 2026
- U.S.Open.com
- USTA.com: “Tennis Terms & Words to Know”
- Time: “Why Is Tennis Scored So Weirdly?”
- L’Equipe: “Questions you’ve never dared to ask about tennis (4/5): why do we count 15, 30, 40…?”
- Merriam-Webster: “Deuce”
- Oxford English Dictionary: “Ace”
The post What’s with All the “Love” in Tennis? Here’s the History Behind the Sport’s Most Confusing Terms appeared first on Reader's Digest.
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