Love

at billiards, rackets, and many other games, nothing: five points to none would be “five LOVE ,”—a LOVE game being when one player does not score at all. The term is also used at whist, “six LOVE ,” “four LOVE ,” when one side has marked up six, four, or any other number, and the other none. A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for July, 1780, derives it either from LUFF , an old Scotch word for the hand, or from the Dutch , LOEF , the LOOF , weather-gauge ( Sewell’s Dutch Dictionary , 4to, 1754); but it more probably, from the sense of the following, denotes something done without reciprocity.