Zipf's law

proper noun

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

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Meanings

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

    So Zipf’s Law suggests that you scale all your word frequencies (and document frequencies) with the log() function, the inverse of exp().

    2019, Hobson Lane, Cole Howard, Hannes Max Hapke, Natural Language Processing In Action […] , Shelter Island: Manning, →ISBN

Origin

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.

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Cite this entry
APA

Zipf's law. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Zipf's%20law

MLA

“Zipf's law.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Zipf's%20law. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Zipf's law,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Zipf's%20law.

Source: Zipf's law on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.