Pronunciation: /ˈpleɪshəʊldə(r)/
noun
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1 Mathematics a significant zero in the decimal representation of a number.
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a symbol or piece of text used in a mathematical expression or in an instruction in a computer program to denote a missing quantity or operator.
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2 Linguistics an element of a sentence that is required by syntactic constraints but carries little or no semantic information, for example the word it as a subject in it is a pity that she left, where the true subject is that she left.