Why Is Tennis Scored 15, 30, 40?

How does scoring work inside a tennis game?

Under the Rules of Tennis of the International Tennis Federation (ITF), the sport's governing body, a standard game is counted "Love", "15", "30", "40" and then "Game", with the server's score called first.^[1] "Love" simply means zero, and a tied score uses the word "all", so two points each is "30-all".^[2]

The count changes when each side has won three points: the score is then "Deuce", not "40-all".^[1] Whoever wins the next point has the "Advantage"; if they also win the point after that, they win the game, and if they lose it, the score goes back to deuce.^[1] The United States Tennis Association (USTA) calls the advantage "Ad-In" when the server wins the deuce point and "Ad-Out" when the receiver does.^[2]

How are sets and matches won?

The ITF rules name two main ways to score a set.^[1] In an "Advantage Set", the first player or team to win six games with a lead of two games takes the set, however long that takes.^[1] A "Tie-break Set" is the same, except that at six games all a tie-break game is played.^[1]

A tie-break is counted in plain numbers: "Zero", "1", "2", "3" and so on.^[1] The first to seven points wins the game and the set, as long as they lead by two; otherwise it carries on until someone does.^[1] A match is played as the best of three sets or the best of five.^[1]

The tie-break came much later: the International Tennis Hall of Fame credits its founder, Jimmy Van Alen, with inventing it: he first developed his scoring system in 1958 to end marathon sets and matches, and the US Open was the first major tournament to use tie-breaks, in 1970.^[4] At the four Grand Slam tournaments, a deciding set that reaches six games all is now settled by a 10-point tie-break, won by two clear points.^[2] The Australian Open introduced that format in 2019, and the other three majors followed in 2022.^[2][3]

What is "no-ad" scoring?

An appendix to the ITF rules lists approved alternatives, and "No-Ad" scoring is one of them.^[1] Points are still counted love, 15, 30 and 40, but at deuce a single deciding point is played, and whoever wins it wins the game.^[1] The receiver chooses whether to take that serve on the right or the left half of the court.^[1] The same appendix also allows a match tie-break in place of a deciding final set.^[1]

Why is tennis scored 15, 30, 40?

Nobody knows for certain: Elizabeth Wilson, the author of a history of tennis, told TIME she did not think anybody really knows how the system started or why it developed as it did.^[5]

What is clear is that the count is very old, and at first it rose in equal steps: 15, 30, 45.^[5] TIME cites a poem written a few years after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 that scores a game between England's King Henry V and the French Dauphin this way, and a dialogue by the scholar Erasmus from around the 1520s in which a player says "we've got 30, we've got 45".^[5] It puzzled people even then: in the 1520s a writer named Jan van den Berghe asked why players won fifteen points for a single stroke.^[5]

How 45 became 40 is also unclear.^[5] The sports historian Heiner Gillmeister, as reported by TIME, found that one 16th-century English text already used 40, and that a treatise from a few decades earlier shows French students shortening "45" to "40" while their teacher corrected them.^[5]

Modern lawn tennis did not start out with this count: in the version for which Major Walter Clopton Wingfield published rules in the 1870s, points were counted one by one.^[5] The first Wimbledon Championship, held by the All England Croquet Club in 1877, went back to the scoring of the older indoor game, real tennis: 15, 30, 40.^[5]

The clock-face and jeu de paume theories

The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), which governs tennis in Britain, describes two popular theories.^[6] In the first, people in medieval France kept score on a clock face, moving the hand to 15, 30 and 45, with the game won at 60.^[6] In the LTA's telling, 45 was later changed to 40 so that a tied game could not be won by a single point: from 40-40, the hand moved forward by 10 for what became "advantage", and one more point won the game.^[6] Critics of the clock theory point out that minute hands were only introduced in the late 1500s and became common even later.^[5]

The second theory goes back to jeu de paume, a handball game played in France from which tennis developed.^[6][7] According to the LTA, its court was 45 feet long, and a player who won a point moved 15 feet forward to serve, another 15 feet after a second point (30 feet) and 10 feet after a third (40 feet).^[6] Other explanations have relied on multiplication, the scoring of other games and the distances between lines on early courts, but TIME reports that no definite answer has been found.^[5]

Where do "love" and "deuce" come from?

"Love" has meant "nothing" since the 1700s, in card games such as whist and bridge as well as in racket sports, but how it got that meaning is unexplained.^[5] The lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower told NPR that before "love", tennis players said "nothing" or "nil".^[7]

The best-known theory links it to the French "l'oeuf", "the egg", because an egg is shaped like a zero, and the Australian Open's scoring guide repeats it.^[3][7] Language experts are doubtful: Sheidlower notes that the expression does not appear in French, and Gillmeister argues that "l'oeuf" would more likely have become something like "leaf" in English.^[5][7] Sheidlower finds it more plausible that the word comes from playing "for the love of the game", an idiom the English used before tennis became popular.^[7] Another suggestion is the Dutch or Flemish "lof", meaning honour.^[5][7]

"Deuce" is easier: it comes from "deux", the French word for "two".^[5][7] Even so, TIME notes that how and when the word moved into tennis is less clear.^[5]