zero in
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.63 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To successfully narrow down a search (for).
verb
To concentrate or focus one's attention (on a task).
verb
To converge (on).
Example Sentences
- "The pilot zeroed in on the bunker and launched a guided missile."
- "Zero in and find a watermark in the image."
- "When you invoke the VAX C compiler with -p for profiling it generates an assembly-language call to a profiling subroutine for which I substituted my own heap-checker, and that enabled me to zero in on a heap-violation which was caused by an array-out-of-bounds condition."
- "The Biden administration has also zeroed in on the building, Federation Tower East, the tallest skyscraper in the Russian capital."
- "We have zeroed in on the source of the problem."
- "See if you can zero in on the caller."
Etymology
The phrase possibly comes from adjusting a sighting mechanism of a firearm to minimise the discrepancy between where the sight points and where a bullet lands on a target. Another possible source is the Cartesian coordinate system in mathematics. In the coordinate system, points are defined relative to an origin (point of reference) labeled O, which has an (x,y) coordinate pair of (0,0).