> [!infobox] <s class="aside-in"><em>mentioned in 1 topic, 1 source</em></s> #### <s class="topic-title">[[Zipf's Law]]</s> > [!wikipedia] [Zipf's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's%20law) > > Zipf's law is an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics that refers to the fact that for many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences, the rank-frequency distribution is an inverse relation. > > Zipf's law was originally formulated in terms of quantitative linguistics, stating that given some corpus of natural [[language]] utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus. #### Related No results to show for list query.