Human action recognition refers to automatic recognizing human actions from a video clip, which is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision. Due to the fact that annotating video data is laborious and time-consuming, most of the existing works in human action recognition are limited to a number of small scale benchmark datasets where there are a small number of video clips associated with only a few human actions and a video clip often contains only a single action. In reality, however, there often exist multiple human actions in a video stream. Such a video stream is often weakly-annotated with a set of relevant human action labels at a global level rather than assigning each label to a specific video episode corresponding to a single action, which leads to a multi-label learning problem. Furthermore, there are a great number of meaningful human actions in reality but it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to collect/annotate video clips regarding all of various human actions, which leads to a zero-shot learning scenario. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that has addressed all the above issues together in human action recognition. In this paper, we formulate a real-world human action recognition task as a multi-label zero-shot learning problem and propose a framework to tackle this problem in a holistic way. Our framework holistically tackles the issue of unknown temporal boundaries between different actions for multi-label learning and exploits the side information regarding the semantic relationship between different human actions for knowledge transfer. As a result, our framework leads to a joint latent ranking embedding for multi-label zero-shot human action recognition. A novel neural architecture of two component models and an alternate learning algorithm are proposed to carry out the joint latent ranking embedding learning. Thus, multi-label zero-shot recognition is done by measuring relatedness scores of action labels to a test video clip in the joint latent visual and semantic embedding spaces. We evaluate our framework with different settings, including a novel data split scheme designed especially for evaluating multi-label zero-shot learning, on two weakly annotated multi-label human action datasets: Breakfast and Charades. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in multi-label zero-shot human action recognition.