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''nought'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260125204041-00-⌔

nought - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

nought (plural noughts)

  • Nothing; something which does not exist.
    • ✤ “It is the truth; naught have I hidden from thee, Kallikrates.”1
  • A thing or person of no worth or value; nil.
  • Not any quantity of number; zero; the score of no points in a game.
    • ✤ * 0.335 cm is nought/zero point three three five of a centimeter.*
  • The figure or character representing, or having the shape of, zero.

Adjective

nought

  • (obsolete) Good for nothing; worthless.
    • ✤ Synonyms: good-for-naught, no good, valueless; see also Thesaurus: worthless
    • ✤ It is nought, it is nought (saith the buyer:) but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.2
  • Wicked, immoral.
    • ✤ Synonyms: depraved, iniquitous, unscrupulous; see also Thesaurus: immoral

Verb

nought (third-person singular simple present noughts, present participle noughting, simple past and past participle noughted)

  • To abase, to set at nought.
    • ✤ In this naked word sin, our Lord brought to my mind, generally, all that is not good, and the shameful despite and the utter noughting that He bare for us in this life, and His dying; and all the pains and passions of all His creatures, ghostly and bodily; (for we be all partly noughted, and we shall be noughted following our Master, Jesus, till we be full purged, that is to say, till we be fully noughted of our deadly flesh and of all our inward affections which are not very good;)3
    • ✤ The nought which is you has devoured the style and been sustained for a while as a non-you until the style is emptied out by the noughting self.4
    • ✤ Your usefulness is zero, your worth zero, and as zero you deserve to be treated as nothing, and in the extreme, noughted.5
    • ✤ What is the use of noughting yourself? Who is noughting who? What is the use of searching for yourself? Who is searching for who? There are not two of you! You cannot find yourself, or the absence of yourself.6

Adverb

nought

  • To no extent; in no way; not at all.
  • Not.

Pronoun

nought

  • Nothing; zero.

Etymology

From Middle English nought, noght, noȝt, from Old English nōwiht, nāwiht, which in turn comes from ne-ā-wiht, which was a phrase used as an emphatic “no”, meaning “not anything”.7 Equivalent to ne +‎ ought or ne +‎ a +‎ wight. Doublet of naught and not.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /nɔːt/
  • (Standard Southern British, Australian, New Zealand) IPA: /noːt/
  • (MLE) IPA: /nʊt/
  • (US, without the cot–caught merger) IPA: /nɔt/
  • (US, cot–caught merger, Atlantic Canada) IPA: /nɑt/
    • Audio (US, cot–caught merger): 🔊
  • (Canada, Eastern New England) IPA: /nɒt/
  • (Scotland) IPA: /nɔt/
  • Rhymes: -ɔːt
  • Homophones: naught; not, knot (both cot–caught merger)

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Proverbs 20:14: ↩

  3. 1393, Julian of Norwich, translated by Grace Warrack, Revelations of Divine Love, published 1901: ↩

  4. 1983, Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, page 25: ↩

  5. 2001, William Desmond, Ethics and the Between, page 507: ↩

  6. 2003, Wu Wei Wei, The Tenth Man: The Great Joke (which Made Lazarus Laugh), →ISBN, page 81: ↩

  7. Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language, page 98. ↩

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