What:
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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.
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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.”
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Pictorially(?): It looks like the following: