Zipf's law

E595317

Zipf's law is an empirical statistical principle observing that in many datasets, such as word frequencies in natural language, the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table.

All labels observed (2)

Label Occurrences
Zipf's law canonical 9
Zipf–Mandelbrot law 1

How this entity was disambiguated

Statements (49)

Predicate Object
instanceOf empirical law
power law
statistical law
appliesTo city size distributions
income distributions
internet traffic
natural language text
population of cities
scientific paper citations
web site popularity
word frequency distributions
approximateDate 1940s
category empirical statistical laws
laws of linguistics
coreStatement the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its rank
describes heavy-tailed distributions
scale-free behavior
explainedBy principle of least effort
field complex systems
information theory
quantitative linguistics
statistical linguistics
hasGeneralization Zipf–Mandelbrot law
linked to: Zipf's law

discrete Pareto distribution
mathematicalForm f(r) = C / r^s
f(r) ∝ 1/r
namedAfter George Kingsley Zipf
linked to: George K. Zipf
originatedBy George Kingsley Zipf
linked to: George K. Zipf
property approximate rather than exact
empirically observed
scale invariant form
publicationContext Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort
relatedTo Benford's law
Heaps' law
Pareto distribution
power-law distribution
rank-size rule
typicalExponent s ≈ 1
usedIn computational linguistics
corpus linguistics
data compression
economics
information retrieval
language modeling
natural language processing
network science
urban studies
variable frequency
rank

How these facts were elicited

Referenced by (10)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

George K. Zipf knownFor Zipf's law
subject linked to: George
George Kingsley Zipf knownFor Zipf's law
subject linked to: Zipf
George Kingsley Zipf formulated Zipf's law
subject linked to: Zipf
Zipf hasEponymousConcept Zipf's law
Zipf's law hasGeneralization Zipf–Mandelbrot law
linked to: Zipf's law