A form of agriculture in which seed is sown in unploughed ground, herbicides being used to kill or control any existing vegetation; = no-tilln., sod plantingn..
1963
‘Zero tillage’ may become a standard practice of some humid-area corn growers if results of preliminary research are borne out in further studies.
Kingsport (Tennessee) News 14 January 2/4
1971
Even fairly low levels of pesticide destroyed these bacteria... The situation is made even worse by the growing popularity of ‘zero-tillage’.
New Scientist 25 March 663/1
2008
The adoption of zero tillage has led to improved soil water management and increased water use by subsequent crops.
zero tillage typically occurs about 0.02 times per million words in modern written English.
zero tillage 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 tillage, n., 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
0.015
1970
0.017
1980
0.017
1990
0.017
2000
0.021
2010
0.022
Frequency of zero tillage, n., 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
0.002
2018
0.0022
2019
0.0031
2020
0.0031
2021
0.0026
2022
0.0032
2023
0.0033
2024
0.0021
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.