Word.ws English Dictionary

Zipf's law

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.

Proper noun

Zipf's law

  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 of Zipf's law

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.

Questions about Zipf's law

What does Zipf's law mean?
Zipf's law means the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution.
What part of speech is Zipf's law?
Zipf's law is a proper noun.

Words near Zipf's law in the dictionary

  1. zipcodes
  2. zipcuffs
  3. zipeprol
  4. Zipes
  5. Zipf
  6. Zipf's law
  7. Zipfel
  8. Zipfels
  9. Zipfian
  10. Zipfian distribution
  11. Zipfian distributions

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Zipf's law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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