We were having a conversation the other day and a guy said something like, well that’s not the way we did it back in aught four. I hadn’t heard “aught” used as a number in a long time, but when I was growing up, it seemed like that’s what everyone said. Take 703 for instance — today we usually say “seven zero three.” But when I was little, at least in Oklahoma, most people would say “seven aught three.”
That’s just the way people talked — they’d say “back in aught-four Bush was president….” or something like that. According to the dictionary, using the term “aught” could mean both “zero” and “anything.”
So aught is an old-fashioned word that was fairly commonly used in the past to mean zero. There are a number of reasons that the use of aught to mean zero has declined — or gone away entirely….
Aught could mean both nothing and anything — that led to confusion. If you said he has aught of sense, it could mean he has some sense or no sense — depending on interpretation.
As mathematics and science advanced, zero became the universally accepted term — especially in education, business and technology.
Over time, English speakers naturally favored other words, like nothing or simply zero, which were clearer and more commonly used in everyday speech.
Aught was more common in older English dialects, especially in Britain, but it gradually faded from everyday American and even British English.
But even today, you still find some old codgers that use aught in certain phrases — like referring to the early 2000s as “the aughts.”
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