nothing

1. 1.

   a quantity of no importance

   “it looked like nothing I had ever seen before”

   “reduced to nil all the work we had done”

   “we racked up a pathetic goose egg”

   “it was all for naught”

   “I didn't hear zilch about it”

   Synonymsnilnixnadanullaughtciphercyphergoose eggnaughtzerozilchzipzippo

   Broaderrelative quantity

   Narrowernihilbugger all

1. 1.

   in no respect; to no degree

   “he looks nothing like his father”

Other forms of nothing

plural

nothings·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about nothing

What does nothing mean?

nothing means "a quantity of no importance". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in nothing?

nothing has 2 syllables: not-hing. The stress falls on "not". In IPA it is /ˈnʌθɪŋ/.

What is another word for nothing?

Close synonyms include nil, nix, nada, null, aught. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is nothing a common word?

nothing is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.