(Of a bank account) operated with no continuing balance, funds being transferred to it only to the extent required to meet the withdrawals made.
1974
With a Zero Balance account, a customer will pay a small charge for actual activity.
U.S. Investor/Eastern Banker 26 August 42/2
1983
A controlled disbursement account is a type that bankers call a ‘zero balance account’—it contains no cash at the end of the day after all checks have been paid. There are no funds left idle.
Fortune 18 April 76/2
1996
We will open a zero balance account on the right basis.
Financial Times 19 June (Private Banking section) 3/2
zero balance typically occurs about 0.05 times per million words in modern written English.
zero balance 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 balance, adj., 1970–2010
* 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
1970
0.05
1980
0.05
1990
0.05
2000
0.05
2010
0.055
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.