(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.
1962
A revised system of reviewing budgetary needs—‘zero-base’ budgeting..is designed to facilitate a thorough analysis of the Department's total work program, produce a realistic appraisal of..work priorities, and result in the most effective use of personnel and other resources.
zero-base typically occurs about 0.03 times per million words in modern written English.
zero-base 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-base, 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
0.039
1970
0.034
1980
0.03
1990
0.03
2000
0.036
2010
0.025
Originally published as part of the entry for zero, n. & adj.