...in tennis?

l'œuf = the egg (zero).

You better ask someone else how to pronounce it, though.

~~~~
Edit: Yikes! Dr Bill, ye olde high-school French scholar (as he puts it), points out my lack of a u in "egg." Thanks, Bill.

Because love is blind and the truth can see...

It seems to have been adapted from the phrase
'to play for love (of the game)' (that is, to play for nothing).
Although the theory is often heard that it represents the French word l'oeuf an 'egg'
(from the resembance between an egg and a nought) this seems unlikely.
But the cricketer's 'duck' is another matter.
_________________________________________ Ask Oxford

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/
aboutwordorigins/lovenil?view=uk

Or made tiny______________ http://tinyurl.com/635xl

Well, thanks to all three of you.

So, it seems...to be....

And since many play for love in sports, isn't it funny that only tennis gets the love zero.

What more fit for love than eggs

or nothing

You better ask someone else how to pronounce it, though.

Our unimpeachable sources elsewhere on this board suggest that it's "longf".

Because hate is reserved for golf?

Ah, so I see you're a golfer TEd. All golfers I know say that golf is the game you love to hate.

>Ah, so I see you're a golfer TEd.

Heavens, no. My father taught me when I was little more than a toddler that golf is like trying to get rich. You drive and drive to get to the green and almost always end up going in the hole.

My favorite anecdote about golf concerns the woman who asked her husband how golf was scored. When told the idea was to get around the course in as few strokes as possible, she asked him, "Why bother?"

Then there's the apocryphal story about Danny Quayle's entrance into law school. It was based on a mutual mistake of fact. When asked what his handicap was, he replied, "Two strokes."

I found this:

What is the origin of the scoring system in tennis: love, 15, 30, 40?

The rules of the new game of lawn tennis were drawn up by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in 1875. Scoring derived from real, or royal, tennis, which had its origins in medieval cathedral cloisters. The name comes from the French habit of calling out tenez! (take this!) before serving. In real tennis, each exchange was worth 15 points, the score of 40 being an abbreviation for 45. Deuce is a corruption of a deux (meaning two consecutive exchanges needed to win). Love is either a corruption of l'oeuf (an egg) or playing not seriously but for the love of the game.
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view.php/341

...What concerns me about this is the deuce bit, not the love bit.
If you listen carefully to the French Open, you will hear that the first deuce is called as 'quarante á' (at least that's what it sounds like to me, presumably short for quarante á chacun - 40 each), rather than 'deuce'. A second or subsequent deuce is called as 'égalité' - equality.
SO if this all comes from the French, why don't they use it?

But the cricketer's 'duck' is another matter.
_________________________________________ Ask Oxford
?????
Since when do ducks play cricket?