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Zipf's law - Wikipedia

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Zipf's law (/zɪf/, German: [ts͡ɪpf]) is an empirical law that often holds, approximately, when a list of measured values is sorted in decreasing order. It states that the value of the nth entry is inversely proportional to n. The best known instance of Zipf's law applies to the frequency table of words in a text or corpus of natural language: This law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf,[3][4][5] and is still an important concept in quantitative linguistics. It has been found to apply to many other types of data studied in the physical and social sciences. In mathematical statistics, the concept has been formalized as the Zipfian distribution: a family of related discrete probability distributions whose rank-frequency distribution is an inverse power law relation. They are related to Benford's law and the Pareto distribution. Some sets of time-dependent empirical data deviate somewhat from Zipf's law. Such empirical distributions are said to be quasi-Zipfian. In 1

Zipf's law - Wikipedia Jump to content From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Probability distribution For the linguistics law on word length, see Zipf's law of abbreviation . A plot of the frequency of each word as a function of its frequency rank for two English language texts: Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1652) and H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) in a log-log scale. The dashed line is the ideal law y ∝ 1 x {\textstyle y\propto {\frac {1}{x}}} . Zipf's law ( / z ɪ f / ) is an empirical law stating that when a set of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the n -

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