Zipf's law

Meaning

Proper Noun

• The fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution.

Origin

• 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.