Do you use the number “zero” and letter “o” interchangeably?

25 comments

1. I speak maybe 7-8 languages, none of them, except English, does that.

2. In Spanish they’re not. I was surprised when I learnt that zero and o could be used interchangeably in English.

3. I guess it has to do with the “inconvenience” of being a two syllable word (even though you also have seven that does not have a one syllable alter ego)?

   Funny how nobody would call James Bond zero zero seven or even double zero seven.

   In French, 0 is zéro. Never “o”.

4. In Polish we have “zero” and that’s all there is to it.

5. No. It’s not done in my home country.

   And even in English, you can only use it interchangeably when it’s a spoken number and only when you are referring to numbers. So you can refer to zero as o but you cannot refer to letter o as zero. And you wouldn’t use it interchangeably when it’s written.

6. No, like everywhere else I think, apart from English speaking countries! Zero is 0.

   James Bond is ‘zero zero sette’.

7. Nope we don’t do that. When we’re saying phone numbers we would say, for example, nula šest jedan which translates to zero six one

8. In Australia too, our emergency number is “”000” and is called “Triple o”

9. Zero is “Nič” or informally “Nula”. O is an O. There is no interchangable use of 0 and O.

10. It’s done in English but not in other languages that I know of, i did get in the habit of interchanging them in English as well but I try to avoid that because it is weird.

11. This just blew my mind, when reading out my telephone number I’ll say ohh 77 had never thought about this before.

12. Not in German. If someone told me their phone number and suddenly there was a letter between the numbers it would definitely get me confused. “0” is “Null” and “o” is “o”.

13. No. We usually spell out zero (“nulla”) or sometimes short it to “null”.

14. Are they used interchangeably in the UK? I hadn’t noticed

15. English is the only one that does that. At least of the languages that i know.

16. Probably only occurs in languages where the word for zero is more than one syllable

17. No, it’s always “zero”. “O” means “he/she/it” (without gender) in Turkish.

18. Not in Bulgarian, either. We always say “нула” (it’s how by English rules you would pronounce nuhla), which means zero.

19. It can be problematic when asking about an Eircode or other alphanumerical identifier. I find it very annoying in my call centre role. IS IT THE LETTER O, OR A ZERO? JUST SAY ZERO.

20. They aren’t “used interchangeably” we sometimes use it for pronounciating string of numbers, typically phone numbers or maybe a barcode or something but that’s it,only spoken, not written.

    In fact in most product codes or serial numbers and alphanumeric sequences that may need to be scanned or called out, they dont contain the letter “o” on purpose.

21. No, never. I think that would cause confusion. Catalan is spoken slightly faster than English and if you used o instead of zero you should pronouce it very clearly and slowly to avoid mistakes, and then there would not be any advantage in using a shorter word.

22. No. But in years we can either say the century then the year, or the whole year as a number.

    For example 1984 can be said “mil neuf cent quatre-vingt quatre” or “dix-neuf cent quatre-vingt quatre” (One thousand nine hundred, or nineteen hundred).
    Notice that for a year “mille” is written “mil”.

23. Yeah I do NOT like using, or rather, saying, the letter, “o” representing the number zero….so many people I know, & within earshot, hear them say “o” instead of zero when rhyming off a phone #, bank/credit card, or a series of numbers

24. No, because it wouldn’t make sense. The word for 0 is “nul”, not exactly a hard word to pronounce.

25. No. Zero is a number. O is a letter. They are not the same and I do not use them interchangeably.