What do the points in tennis mean?

Question

i know it goes 15-30-40-win, but why did they pick those points?

Answer 1

It is decided by a secret society that controlls the outcomes of the games.

Answer 2

The British.

They also like Pints of bear, fancy standing i cues, and drink a cuppa every day.

Answer 3

apparently, in medieval france, a clockface was used to keep track of the score of each game. it started as love-15-30-45-60 in medieval times. so when the score reached 60, someone wins. they changed it to forty cause it was easier to say with its preceeding numbers.

love may have been a reference for the french word for egg, l'oeuf, because eggs look like zeroes

Answer 4

Good question..... Maybe they were just really bad at math.

Answer 5

Originally it was 0, 15, 30, 45, 60, which makes a bit more sense. 60 is a nice round number, the same as the number of minutes in an hour. It goes back several hundred years, so it’s kind of been lost.

Later, "forty-five" was abbreviated to "forty", which is faster to say.

There’s some debate over the origin of "love". Some say it’s French, "l’oeuf", meaning "egg", which looks like a zero. Others say it’s an English term, along the lines of "playing for love" (as in, if you’re scoring zero, you must be playing because you love it, because you’re not good at it.) The first reference the OED can find is in 1742, in English, but the origin is still unclear.