George Zipf

…proposed by the American linguist George Zipf in Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language (1932). Zipf’s Law states that the relative frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. That is, the second most frequent word is used only half as often as the…

…originally proposed by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902–50) for the frequency of usage of different words in the English language; this frequency is given approximately by f(r) ≅ 0.1/r. Thus, the most common word (rank 1) in English, which is the, occurs about one-tenth of the time in a…