Scoring can seem complicated in tennis, particularly for people unfamiliar with how the game works. Instead of progressing from point to point, each player's game score starts at "love," meaning zero, and progresses by increments of 15 or 10 as the player wins points, until he takes the game.
Origin
The Oxford Dictionaries Online website asserts that "love" in tennis may have arisen from the phrase "to play for love of the game." Since "love" means a score of zero, it follows that players who maintain that score more often than not continue their games because of their affinity for the sport. An alternate theory posits that "love" may have origins with the French word "l'oeuf," meaning "the egg," because the two words sound similar and an egg resembles the number 0. "This seems unlikely" however, the site concludes.
Meaning
Each tennis game begins at a score of love-love, meaning that neither player has any points. "Love" can also be used to mean no games in a set. For example, if two players have completed a total of four games and one player has won all four, the score might be announced as "four games to love." "Love" can mean having zero sets won in a match; "two sets to love," for example.
Scoring
Scoring in a tennis game begins with love and progresses to 15, 30, 40 and game. If two players tie at 40, the score is defined as "deuce"; if the serving player wins the following point, the score is "ad in," and it is "ad out" if the opposing player wins that point. Dean Snyder of the U.S. Professional Tennis Association points out that the score of the serving player is always announced first in a tennis game, so if the server has won two points and is leading, the score would be "30-love." If the server is down by three points, the score is "love-40."
Tiebreaks
To add to the confusion of tennis scoring, "love" does not mean zero in a tiebreak, according to the United States Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation. If two players have reached a set score of six games each and are preparing to play a tiebreak, each has a score of zero, and points add up by ones. For example, if player A wins the first point of a tiebreak, her score becomes 1 rather than 15, as it would in a normal tennis game. Tiebreaks are played until one player wins a total of 7 points; the victor must win by at least 2 points.
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