What is the answer to the crossword clue "zilch"?

There is more than one. 12 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Three squares gives you NIL, NIX and ZIP, and ZIP is the most common answer in American puzzles. NIL is more likely in British ones, where it is the standard word for a score of nothing.

How many letters is the answer to "zilch"?

Anything from 3 to 7. The length with the most candidates is 3. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.

How reliable are these answers?

9 of the 12 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.

Crossword clue

Zilch crossword clue

12 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "zilch", from as short as 3 letters up to 7, grouped below by the length of your slot.

Written by Blake Boege

Answers by length

Everything below fits the clue. What separates them is length, running from 3 letters to 7, so find your row and ignore the rest.

Letters	Answers
3	nilconfirmed by two sources nixconfirmed by two sources zip
4	nadaconfirmed by two sources null zeroconfirmed by two sources
5	aughtconfirmed by two sources nihilconfirmed by two sources
6	cipherconfirmed by two sources cypher naughtconfirmed by two sources
7	nothingconfirmed by two sources

What this list looks like

Length 3 carries 3 answers, the largest group on this page.

Setters reach for 3-letter answers constantly, and here that means NIL, NIX, ZIP.

1 of the 12 are not synonyms at all but specific kinds of what the clue describes.

Which one does the setter mean?

Three squares gives you NIL, NIX and ZIP, and ZIP is the most common answer in American puzzles. NIL is more likely in British ones, where it is the standard word for a score of nothing.

How these differ

English collects words for nothing and these differ by register. NIL and NAUGHT are the formal ones, NAUGHT surviving mainly in set phrases and in noughts and crosses. ZERO and NULL are technical, NULL meaning empty rather than zero in most computing uses. ZIP, NADA and ZILCH are twentieth-century American slang, NADA borrowed from Spanish. CIPHER is the oldest and best: it came from the Arabic for empty, gave English both the zero and the secret code, and is the reason a nonentity can be called a cipher.

Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have

Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.

Where these answers come from

This is a dictionary answering a question, not a copied answer key. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “zilch” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 9 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.

Common questions

What is the answer to the crossword clue "zilch"?: There is more than one. 12 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Three squares gives you NIL, NIX and ZIP, and ZIP is the most common answer in American puzzles. NIL is more likely in British ones, where it is the standard word for a score of nothing.
How many letters is the answer to "zilch"?: Anything from 3 to 7. The length with the most candidates is 3. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
How reliable are these answers?: 9 of the 12 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.