Astrophysics (Index)About

Zipf's law

(particular discrete probability distribution discovered in linguistics)

Zipf's law was formulated regarding word-frequency in languages, stating that the frequencies of a language's most common words are proportioned 1 to 1/2 to 1/3 to 1/4 to 1/5 and so on. The notion was explored by linguist George Kinsley Zipf, and such a probability distribution is termed a Zipfian distribution. This basic sequence of frequency-proportions has been observed in numerous languages. The same sequence has observed in non-linguistic circumstances, and is candidate in characterizing the statistics of sample data under study. Sometimes modifications of this general idea are used, such as adding a constant. Analogous continuous probability distributions are also a possibility.


(statistics,probability)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803133515144
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ZipfsLaw.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176592/
https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/ekanou/ISU535.09X2/Handouts/Review_Material/zipfslaw.pdf
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01855

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