People are only just realising why scoring goes 15, 30, 40 in tennis

dailystar.co.uk:

Should Novak Djokovic have played the Australian Open? Will Roger Federer ever return? Will the French Open include a Covid vaccine mandate?

Such sagas, the one attributed to Djokovic's 12-day battle to remain down under especially, have been enough to leave the average fan leaving mentally exhausted.So picking holes in a scoring system that historians argue back to the 16th century is probably not the priority of supporters and pundits now keen to focus on the action alone in Melbourne.But to many, the pattern of points has been accepted if not entirely understood.

Going 15, 30, 40, and then game doesn't appear like a regulated pattern of numbers.However, now a debate prompted by The Guardian has seemingly provided an explanation into the sequence, and French terminology used.A reader enquiry about the issue prompted Doug Gowan, from Hornsey, to explain. "Tennis scores were shown in the middle ages on two clock faces which went from 0 to 60," he claimed."On each score the pointer moved round a quarter from 0 to 15, 30, 45 and a win on 60.

Somehow the forty five got truncated to forty when the clock faces dropped out of use."Zero was shown as an oval - an egg shape - 'l'oeuf' in French, giving us 'love' for no points. 'Tennis' probably derives from French 'Tenez!'"Others backed up Gowan's post, albeit with slightly different versions of why numbers fail to follow what would be the logical 15, 30, 45 pattern.Is there a scoring format as non-sensical as tennis?