George Kingsley Zipf

George Kingsley Zipf (SAMPA [zIf]), (1902-1950), was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. He is the eponym of Zipf's law, which states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely,

where P_n is the frequency of a word ranked n^th and ^a is almost 1. This means that a word that occurs 10 times more frequently than another word that is ranked 10 less[1].

Zipf worked at Harvard University. He worked with the Chinese languages, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet and .

Table of contents

1 See also 2 Bibliography 3 External link

See also

• Benford's law
• Bradford's law
• Lotka's law

Bibliography

• George K. Zipf, Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least-Effort, Addison-Wesley, Cambridge MA, 1949

External link

• Notes on G.K. Zipf