Zipf's Law — Rank-Frequency Power Law

Live log-log sampling: empirical word frequencies converge to slope −s

Total samples: 0 Empirical slope: - Target slope: -1.00 Distinct words: 0
About: Zipf's law states that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table: P(rank r) ∝ r^(−s). This emerges in natural language (s≈1), city populations, web traffic, and many other human-generated corpora. The log-log plot reveals the power-law slope; as samples accumulate, the empirical distribution converges toward the theoretical line. George Kingsley Zipf discovered this in 1935; Simon (1955) and Mandelbrot (1953) gave generative explanations.