Why Is a Tennis Score 15, 30, 40?

Why Is a Tennis Score 15, 30, 40? Every other sport can count: one, two, three. Tennis goes fifteen, thirty, forty - and calls zero love. Somebody skipped five and nobody ever put it back. The story you have been told is a clock face, a quarter turn per point. It is on nearly every website answering this question and it is almost certainly false, because clocks in that era had no minute hands: the scoring is written down in the 1400s, in a ballad by Charles d'Orleans composed around 1435 in English captivity, and a Latin poem from 1522 still has the full fifteen-thirty-forty-five run. A clock that could show a quarter past anything arrived roughly a century too late to have invented it. So where does fifteen come from? From jeu de paume, the game of the palm, and from a Europe that counted in sixties - which is why an hour has sixty minutes and a circle three hundred and sixty degrees. A quarter of sixty is fifteen. Why forty-five wore down to forty, why love almost certainly is not the French for egg, and why the All England Club in 1877 kept the lot without ever examining it. #OscarExplains #WhyIsTennisScored153040 #WhyIsZeroCalledLoveInTennis #TennisScoringSystemOrigin #JeuDePaumeHistory