What:

  • Basically: The most frequent word in a language appears twice as frequent as the second most recent word, three times as the third most frequent word etc.. I.E. The frequency of a word is inversely proportional to it’s rank.

    • Interestingly, every language seems to share this law.
  • Mathematically: , where:

    • is the frequency of a word with rank ,
    • is the rank of the word (1 for the most frequent word, 2 for the second-most frequent, and so on),
    • is a parameter typically close to 1 (it determines how steep the frequency drop-off is),
    • means “proportional to.”
  • Pictorially(?): It looks like the following: