English Explanatory Dictionary

Zipf's law

English dictionary entry

Meanings

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

Word forms

Zipf's law

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.

Related words

Zipfian distribution Zipfian power law
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