Is it OO or 00 gauge?

[TEAMYAKIMA]

My club is to produce a promo poster and it will include the term 00 - but should it be OO?

 

Whilst 00 seems logical as there is gauge 1 and gauge 3 it appears that we usually write it as OO rather than 00 - am l correct?

 

00 looks wrong to me personally

[Dunsignalling]

Historically, it should be 00.

 

Reason: numerical progression downwards from Gauge 3 > 2 > 1 > 0 > H0 (Half 0) and, by extension, 00.

 

However, any logic started going out of the window when "0" began to be called "O", and that stuck so long ago that few fight it any more. 

 

One late friend of mine, a former Chief Librarian with the precise approach that profession engenders, always insisted on "Nought Gauge" and "Double Nought", too. A certain Mr Swain, formerly of this parish, makes a range of 1:43.5 scale kits named "Zero Zephyrs" IIRC. I'd be hard pressed to come up with any others.

 

Against that backdrop, it was pretty inevitable that "00" would, at least verbally, become "OO". 

 

John

 

EDIT: And, of course, the advent of Hornby Dublo settled the matter good and proper, so it's OO whether we like it or not.   

Edited February 6, 2018 by Dunsignalling

[LBRJ]

I would always go with the OO as in dublo etc

I know this annoys some people. but they seem to be the sort of people that annoying is fun

 

I am sure this thread will go on and on and round and round....rather like a figure 0 or O in fact!

Edited February 6, 2018 by LBRJ

[Kiwi]

Perhaps you could avoid the whole question by using a font that displays O and 0 exactly the same. There are plenty, usually "monospace" ones. It's one of the reasons for some using the "slashed zero", such as used on vehicle number plates (in some countries).

[newbryford]

Does the same poster have other scale/gauge labels?

 

Use the same 0 or O for 0/H0/00. (As Kiwi above suggests)

 

Cheers

Mick

[BR60103]

Slightly sideways:

When my father was in university, there were alumni who had graduated in 1900. They called themselves the "naughty aughties".

 

The (long gone) editor of Model Railroader suspected that it started because HO looked better than H0.

[woodenhead]

Any proper modeller would know it's pronounced peefour or if you're lazy eeee emm

[Ray M]

Got to be OO

or it would be double zero.

[luckymucklebackit]

Well you don't call Shir Shean double zero seven do you?

[Joseph_Pestell]

I think that we have done this one already on RMWeb.

 

But I always aim to follow the historical precedent which makes it 00.

 

It's just unfortunate that in UK English we use "Oh" for both the letter and number. In other countries, 1:43.5/1:45 is referred to as Nul or Zero and 1:87 as Halb Nul.

[Jol Wilkinson]

Just don't refer to it as OO Scale (or 00 Scale).

[MarkSG]

Those of us who are old enough (which is probably most of us on RMweb!) will recall that many early typewriters made no distinction between the numeral 0 and the letter O, using the same key for each (and, also, 1 and l were the same). That was also common in typesetting, in order to reduce the number of different glyphs that were necessary. The word "oh" has always referred to the glyph when used as both a letter and a numeral, and the same glyph was used for both. It's not, as some may suggest, a recent introduction.

 

(The reason why "oh" refers to both 0 and O, but 1 and l have different words, is because our word for 1 has changed over the years, but our word for 0 has not. Originally, the word for 1 was something similar to "el" - a construction which remains as part of the word "eleven" for 11.)

 

It wasn't until the widespread introduction of computers that it became normal to distinguish between 0 and O, because of the need to write numbers as numerics in order to allow the computer to perform mathematical calculations on them. As has already been pointed out in this thread, a common early way of doing that was to carry on using essentially the same glyph as the letter O, but with a slash through it (or, sometimes, with a dot in the middle). That gave way to a more nuanced difference where the letter O is fatter and more rounded, and the number 0 is thinner and more oval. At the same time, the use of the mathematical term "zero" for the numeral 0 became more popular, as a means of distinguishing the two.

 

So, historically, and certainly at the time that OO gauge was introduced, there wouldn't have been any difference. It would have been written as OO, and spoken as "oh oh" (or "double oh", which of course is the derivation of Hornby Dublo), even though it would have been understood as the number rather than the letter.

[Bernard Lamb]

It's a bit like telephone numbers.

Is the first digit oh or zero?

To me it all depends on age, background and experience as to what you use in what context.

I tend to use oh but on the phone when repeating a number to a person that I perceive to be much younger than me I try to remember to use zero.

SWMBO being German uses...... No, let's not go there.

Let's put this one to bed and get onto the use of s or z.  

Bernard

[ejstubbs]

It wasn't until the widespread introduction of computers that it became normal to distinguish between 0 and O, because of the need to write numbers as numerics in order to allow the computer to perform mathematical calculations on them. As has already been pointed out in this thread, a common early way of doing that was to carry on using essentially the same glyph as the letter O, but with a slash through it (or, sometimes, with a dot in the middle).

 

When I was a kid it was still quite common in certain places - mainly European countries I believe - for 1 and 7 to be distinguished in handwriting by putting a horizontal dash across the middle of the 7.  That was because the digit 1 was written as it appears in Arial (ie RMWeb's default font) with one short slanting upstroke followed by a full-height vertical downstroke.  The absence of the "foot" such as in Tahoma ("1"), Verdana ("1") or Times New Roman ("1") means that, written clumsily, a 1 can easily look like a 7.

 

For a while at school I took to writing my 7s with the crossbar, as a sort of teenage affectation.  My maths teacher soon persuaded me of the error of my ways!

 

There seem to be very few computer fonts that use the crossed seven.  On my Mac only Lucida Blackletter, Handwriting Dakota and Bradley Hand Bold use that form of the 7.

 

EDIT: According to Wiki, the use of the crossbar to differentiate 7 from 1 is still common in continental Europe and "increasingly in the UK and Ireland".  That latter statement I would seriously question, based purely on my own observation and experience.  I can't remember seeing a crossed 7 on a handwritten document from anyone in the UK since the I stopped doing it myself in the 1970s!

Edited February 6, 2018 by ejstubbs

[bbishop]

They are both wrong - go for P4.

 

Bill

[Zomboid]

Call it 1:76 (or whatever the ratio is).

[Fenman]

... According to Wiki, the use of the crossbar to differentiate 7 from 1 is still common in continental Europe and "increasingly in the UK and Ireland".  That latter statement I would seriously question, based purely on my own observation and experience.  I can't remember seeing a crossed 7 on a handwritten document from anyone in the UK since the I stopped doing it myself in the 1970s!

 

Embarrassingly, I remember first seeing the crossed 7 on the hand-written score-boards of European editions of It's a Knockout. The continental European judges were in charge of those. It looked strange and exotic to me.

 

Paul

[MarkSG]

Call it 1:76 (or whatever the ratio is).

 

But that tells you nothing about the gauge

[MarkC]

Embarrassingly, I remember first seeing the crossed 7 on the hand-written score-boards of European editions of It's a Knockout. The continental European judges were in charge of those. It looked strange and exotic to me.

 

Paul

Nah - it's just strange... 

[Oldddudders]

The song lyric definitely said "Pennsylvania six-five-o-o-o"

[MarkC]

To me, if you are wanting to emphasise that it's a number rather than a letter, then it's 'Zero' rather than 'Oh'...

 

... but then, that's my training in correct RT through:-

work, where correct RT procedure, even on our hand-held radios, is encouraged

being a licensed Private Pilot (my CAA RT licence number, believe it or not, is 45678 - my friend who did the course at the same time got 45679 - he was not happy...)

Amateur Radio, where I hold a Golf Zero callsign...

 

But when referring to 4mm scale, 16.5mm gauge, it's always been 'double-oh' - I must be of that certain age 

[chriswright03]

0MG!

[GeoffAlan]

It all went to hell in a hand-basket when the called 000 N gauge, getting the N from Nine millimeters the width, or gauge, of the track.. Now the term N scale is used abroad and by some sellers in the UK. By extension T gauge/scale is 3mm track width.

 

I'd prefer using either the numeric scale 1:76 or 1:148 but given in N gauge we have 1:148 1:150 and 1:160 all running on N gauge track......

[Clive Mortimore]

It has to be double "owe".

 

My logic comes from ww2 Royal Artillery signalling procedure. "Zero" is the line set by the survey team from the battery position to the target to which all the guns are aligned. "Owe" is used when giving target map references as in 202340, which would be said "two, owe" "two, three" "four,owe". Any corrections to the ranging shot as observed would be "4 degrees right of zero".

Edited February 6, 2018 by Clive Mortimore

[PatB]

I've just had a look in my 1952 edition of Ernest F Carter's Model Railway Encyclopedia. The advertisers in the back seem divided between 00 and OO camps. Those advertising both scales are consistent in using 0 and 00, or O and OO. Mr Carter himself uses O and OO and, as he apparently founded Model Railway Constructior, might be regarded as having a well informed opinion on the matter.

 

Personally I tend to use 0 and 00 in writing because, IMHO, it looks better, but use Oh and Double-Oh in speech because, IMHO, it sounds less cumbersome than mucking about with zeroes.