Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Nothing; zero.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In musical acoustics, a minute interval, equal to a fifty-first part of a semitone.
  • noun See nill.
  • noun Nothing.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • Nothing; of no account; worthless; -- a term often used for canceling, in accounts or bookkeeping.
  • obsolete Will not.
  • noun (computers) A special value for a variable used in certain computer languages to mean no assigned value, to be distinguished from the value zero.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Nothing; zero.
  • determiner No, not any.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a quantity of no importance

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin nīl, contraction of nihil; see ne in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin nil, a contraction of nihil, nihilum ("nothing"). See nihilism.

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