(Of a budget or budgeting) having each item costed anew, rather than in relation to its size or status in the previous budget; cf. ZBBn.
1963
Encouragement of the ‘zero-based’ budget and the other improvements being made in the city's budgetary process.
Annual Rep. Government D.C., Fiscal Year 1962 i. 5/2
1983
Sir Douglas Wass..proposed two specific changes... The first would be to introduce ‘zero-based budgeting’ to make spending departments consider their action if the money available to them were drastically cut.
Financial Times 10 November 9/1
2013
The Government had introduced a ‘zero-based’ approach to capital spending to ensure value for money for taxpayers.
zero-based typically occurs about 0.06 times per million words in modern written English.
zero-based is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zero-based, adj., 1960–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1960
0.027
1970
0.041
1980
0.051
1990
0.051
2000
0.061
2010
0.072
Frequency of zero-based, adj., 2017–2024
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Modern frequency series are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words, covering the period from 2017 to the present. The corpus is mainly compiled from online news sources, and covers all major varieties of World English.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the corpus.
Period
Frequency per million words
2017
0.058
2018
0.063
2019
0.057
2020
0.056
2021
0.054
2022
0.058
2023
0.053
2024
0.059
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.