Designating a bond or other debt obligation for which no interest is paid, being issued below its redemption price, with the full amount payable on maturity; of or relating to a bond, etc., issued in this way; esp. in zero-coupon bond.
1979
The relationship between yield curves for zero coupon bonds and coupon-bearing bonds is important.
Journal Financevol. 34 189
1981
BAC will file a registration statement..relating to the offer of zero coupon notes to mature in 1990.
Financial Times 19 September 16/1
1994
The most junior bonds, the zero-coupon issue due in 2006, would fetch 13.3 cents on the dollar.
New York Times (Nexis) 15 July d4/5
2014
Japanese investors flocked to zero coupon bonds as all income could be declared as a capital gain.
zero-coupon typically occurs about 0.1 times per million words in modern written English.
zero-coupon is in frequency band 4, which contains words occurring between 0.1 and 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-coupon, 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
0.051
1980
0.088
1990
0.11
2000
0.14
2010
0.17
Frequency of zero-coupon, 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
0.0071
2018
0.013
2019
0.021
2020
0.026
2021
0.033
2022
0.035
2023
0.036
2024
0.031
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.