Zipf's law
English
Etymology
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.
Proper noun
- The fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution.
Related terms
- Zipfian distribution
- Zipfian
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