Minimum
This meaning of this field has changed.
Originally this was how long resolvers (also known as recursors, non-authoritative nameservers) would keep a reply from an authoritative nameserver in its local cache, and answer subsequent queries for those records from its local cache before it will refresh those records from one of the authoritative nameservers. In other words, this value used to specify the default Time-to-Live (TTL) for each record within a zone that did not have an explicit TTL setting.
It later became the Negative Cache TTL (as per RFC 2308); the interval resolvers would cache a lookup with a negative result (unless the SOA's TTL is lower, in which case that would be used).
RFC2308 also described the $TTL directive, which ...
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