Zipf's law
Ley de Zipf
- Date
- 1932 · confidence high
- Place
- Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- George Kingsley Zipf
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Zipf observed that in a text a word's frequency is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table, so the most common word appears roughly twice as often as the second. He drew on earlier observations about city populations and word frequencies, and the pattern turned out to also apply to company sizes, personal incomes and other complex systems.
What it led to
- Formalization of Zipfian distributions in statistics
- Zipf-Mandelbrot law
- Applications in quantitative linguistics and complex systems
Built on
- Felix Auerbach's observations on city populations (1913)
- Alfred J. Lotka's work (1926)