Null

How to spell null

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce null

What does null mean?

1. adjectiveHaving no legal force, value, or effect; amounting to nothing.
2. nounIn programming and databases, a special marker indicating the deliberate absence of any value.

Null in a sentence

• adjective

  The contract was declared null after both parties withdrew.

• noun

  The database stored a null where no phone number had been entered.

• adjective

  A court can render an agreement null and void.

• noun

  The program crashed when it tried to read a null instead of a name.

Where does null come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin nullus, meaning 'not any' or 'none', which was itself a compact compound of ne, meaning 'not', and ullus, meaning 'any' (a diminutive of unus, 'one'). So at its root the word literally means 'not even one'. It entered English in the sixteenth century, often in the legal phrase 'null and void', which borrowed directly from Latin and French legal language to describe something that has no force or effect. From the law it spread into mathematics and later computing, where it came to mean a value of zero, an empty set, or the deliberate absence of any value. The doubled 'l' that trips writers up is simply carried straight over from the Latin nullus, and the same root survives in 'nullify' and 'annul'.

How the word is built

• null (from Latin nullus: not any, none)