Zipf's Law

• Created:: 2023-07-04
• Status:: #soil
• Foundation::
• Project::
• Topic:: mathematics linguistics


What is Zipf's Law?

Zipf’s Law claims that when a list of measured values is sorted in descending order then the nth entry is inversely proportional to n.

In language, for example, the most common English word is ‘the’, making up 7% of occurrences in recorded texts. The next most common word is ‘of’, which, being the second value, makes up half of the number of occurrences of the word ‘the’ (3.5%). The third most common word ‘and’ takes up a third of the number of occurrences of ‘the’ and so forth down the chain.

The law was named after an American linguist called George Kingsley Zipf.

In mathematics, the concept is known as Zipfian distribution.