ground zero

Questions about ground zero

What does ground zero mean?

ground zero means "the target of a projectile (as a bomb or missile)". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is ground zero a common word?

ground zero is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for ground zero come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.