Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Nothing; zero.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. See nill.
- n. Nothing.
- n. In musical acoustics, a minute interval, equal to a fifty-first part of a semitone.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- obsolete Will not.
- Nothing; of no account; worthless; -- a term often used for canceling, in accounts or bookkeeping.
- n. (computers) A special value for a variable used in certain computer languages to mean no assigned value, to be distinguished from the value zero.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a quantity of no importance
Etymologies
- From Latin nil, a contraction of nihil, nihilum ("nothing"). See nihilism. (Wiktionary)
- Latin nīl, contraction of nihil; see ne in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I warmed to the cover for a start, cocoa-eau-de-nil is my current favourite colour combination but I opened it and everything I've known all my life was immediately set out before me.”
“The church of Ménil is a ruin, but the parsonage still stands – a plain little house at the end of the street; and here the curé received us, and led us into a room which he has turned into a chapel.”
“Thus our word nil literally means "not even a wee little bit.”
podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history
“I don’t agree with the Anti-Abortion stance, but if you’re going to use it, use it with vigor and represent it in strong clear language, and, as a Dem, it has to get to the heart of what most pro-choice Dems feel – lowering the rate of abortions to practically nil is a great start.”
Matthew Yglesias » Harold Ford Goes Negative . . . on Eleanor Roosevelt
“His interaction with the actors is almost nil, which is fine with Freeman.”
“Of course, for the Soviets, the difference between a bulldog and a capitalist is essentially nil, which is the less than subtle point to this exercise.”
“The recent chancellors 'debate, a possible preview of Thursday, saw all three participants doing reasonably well: what might be described as a nil-nil-nil draw.”
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“But, as Sherman notes, it would be common for someone with a low income, someone receiving tax-free welfare benefits and someone receiving a tax-free disability income to have no tax payable, or what's called a nil assessment.”
“If you give it a starting position beyond the end of the list, it returns nil, which is the empty-list equivalent of the empty-string "" that (substr) returns.”
“With struct, all the basis keys are optional: user = > (struct bank-account) {: customer-name nil,: balance nil}”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘nil’.
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3-Letter Scrabble Words Which Do Not ...
A list of 3-letter words which cannot be formed by adding a letter to a 2-letter word (see Ken Clark's word lists found at http://www.seattlescrab...
ace, act, aff, aft, apo, app, apt, auk, ava, ave, avo, azo and 225 more...
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3-letter Scrabble Words
aah, aal, aas, aba, abo, abs, aby, ace, act, add, ado, ads and 995 more...
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SAT Words
Know these common SAT words
taciturn, docile, expedient, superfluous, eclectic, impromptu, dogmatic, invidious, rhetoric, tenacious, pretentious, parsimony and 14 more...
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essbunny@gmail.com's list
Intrigued by these words...
sphincter, blush, flume, shingle, spurt, pulp, precious, squeal, zest, zeal, cherish, fervor and 35 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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Words I Know
List of most of the words I've learned
garner, abase, abate, abdicate, abduct, aberration, abet, abhor, abide, abject, abjure, abnegation and 1046 more...
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colleen's words
yellow, green, pie, blue, fur, people, incense, book, brown, avuncular, mountain, fog and 1316 more...
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MsHalston's Words
theoretically, insufferable, apolitico, milquetoast, egregious, aplomb, elan, fraught, flummox, befrocked, moll, molten and 605 more...
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Amusing words
interesting words
bonce, furcate, tapioca, tillage, desalinate, garish, litmus, roadhog, azoic, haberdasher, imbroglio, polliwog and 802 more...
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Really Cool Three-Letter Words
None of your "the" and "get" here. No, no. This is the place for auk and sty, and words of that ilk.
One might think that being limited to only three letters would prevent many words fro...auk, sty, ilk, ani, owl, zit, ink, eau, rum, pus, pwe, pyx and 105 more...
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Ruby Reserved Words
alias, and, begin, break, case, class, def, defined?, do, else, elsif, end and 26 more...
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Danagrams
void, relearn, rain, reordain, evil, real, divine, evildoer, varied, role, loner, dire and 85 more...
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outer darkness
black hole, abyss, lack, dearth, nothingness, vacuum, void, thin air, dark, ether, oblivion, emptiness and 16 more...
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Number words
A list of some words for numbers (mostly cardinal numbers, but a few other important ones that have short descriptions).
aleph-one, aleph-null, infinity, googolplex, googol, trillion, billion, myllion, million, myriad, great gross, thousand and 43 more...
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Down in the Zero
What The Little Boy Shot At...
zilch, nil, zip, nihilo, void, vacuum, nada, rien, goose egg, diddly squat, naught, null and 23 more...
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danlowlite's Words
xenoglossia, magnified, deicide, hir, sie, manifesto, bernie, semantics, twitch, corpronational, oblivion, uncentering and 11 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for nil.
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