How did zero become a placeholder?

Zero became a placeholder when people started using it to show empty spaces in numbers, like how you use an empty plate at a dinner table to mean someone is missing.

Imagine you're setting up a number with your friends. Each of you holds a plate that represents a digit, 1, 2, 3, and so on. If someone isn’t there, their plate stays empty, like an empty plate at the table.

At first, people didn’t have zero to use as a placeholder. So if you had ten apples, it might look like this: 1 (for one group of ten) and then no plates for the ones, just an empty space. But that could be confusing! Was it 10 apples or 1 apple?

Then came zero, which was like having a plate with nothing on it. Now, if you had ten apples, it looked like 10, one group of ten and zero ones. That made counting and writing numbers much easier!

It's like when you're playing with blocks: if you have 23 blocks, that’s two groups of ten and three ones. If you had 20 blocks, it’s two groups of ten and zero ones, so using zero helps show that there are no extra blocks to count.