The most reduced form of weak ablaut grade, in which the vowel disappears; = nil-graden.
1888
Mors is..in the zero-grade, the Latin -or- representing Indo-European sonant r.
Academy 11 February 98/3
1965
The unfortunate myth that there is some essential connection between aorist aspect and stems consisting of zero-grade root plus accented thematic vowel in Indo-European.
Languagevol. 41 519
2009
Lubotsky's equation would require the nonassibilated stop to have been transferred at a late stage from the 0-grade or zero grade.
zero grade typically occurs about 0.02 times per million words in modern written English.
zero grade 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 grade, n., 1890–2010
* 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
1890
0.0016
1900
0.0025
1910
0.0027
1920
0.0029
1930
0.0043
1940
0.0067
1950
0.0093
1960
0.012
1970
0.014
1980
0.016
1990
0.017
2000
0.019
2010
0.019
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.