zipf's law
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.16 in modern English
25
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
1
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution.
Example Sentences
- "So Zipf’s Law suggests that you scale all your word frequencies (and document frequencies) with the log() function, the inverse of exp()."
Etymology
From Zipf + law. After George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), American linguist. From the observed distribution of a word's frequency of occurrence against its rank of occurrence, discovered in Zipf's research, as a graph of logarithm of frequency against logarithm of ranking resulting in a straight line with −1 slope.