love

Love traces back through Old English lufu and Proto-West Germanic *lubu to Proto-Indo-European *lewbʰ-, meaning care or desire. The verb form, Old English lufian, was built directly from that noun.

The word has stayed remarkably close to its ancient sense of care and desire across a thousand years of English. Its use for a zero score in games like tennis is a separate, much later development, once popularly but wrongly linked to the French word for egg.

It's cognate with German Liebe and Dutch liefde, both meaning love, as well as with Russian любовь (ljubovʹ) and Latin libido, meaning desire.