Zipfn.
/zɪpf/, U.S. /zɪpf/ 1. Zipf's law n. any of several principles proposed or popularized by George Zipf, or based on his work, spec.: (a) the observation that the length of words or expressions is generally in inverse relationship to their frequency of occurrence, more frequently used words being typically shorter; (b) (also Zipf law) a statistical model according to which, in a collection of linguistic utterances, the frequency of a word is (approximately) inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table (the second most common word being half as frequent as the most common, the third most common being a third as frequent, and so on); (also) a generalized application of this model to rank versus frequency distribution in other contexts.
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the mind > language > linguistics > other schools of linguistics > [noun] > psycholinguistics or neurolinguistics > specific methods or principles
Schallanalyse1930
Zipf's law1936
1936 B. F. Skinner in Jrnl. Psychol. 2 85 The application of Zipf's law to verbal behavior is considerably restricted.
1967 M. Schlauch Language vii. 143 He [sc. Zipf] came to the conclusion that the length of a word tends to decrease as its relative frequency of use increases... The formula..has come to be known as ‘Zipf's Law’, often quoted if also sometimes questioned.
1971 Jrnl. Gen. Psychol. Oct. 297 Zipf's law predicts an inverse ratio in the rank order distribution of varieties such that a minimal number of varieties covers a maximal number of responses and a maximal number of varieties covers a minimal number of responses.
2003 F. Hill & C. Gaddy Siberian Curse ii. 19 Zipf's law says that..cities generally seem to obey a curious mathematical law with respect to their sizes: a country's largest city is approximately twice as large as the second-largest city, three times as big as the third city..[etc.]. The Russian cities deviate from Zipf's law in a way not seen for any other country.
2016 Jrnl. Econ. Perspectives 30 187 A ‘Zipf's law’ is a power law with an exponent of 1.
2. As a modifier. Designating statistical concepts based on versions or applications of Zipf's law, as in Zipf curve, Zipf distribution, Zipf relation, etc.
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1953 Population Index 19 275/1 A description of the peculiarities of the distribution of towns by size, 1951, with discussion of economic factors and applications of the Zipf analysis.
1961 Jrnl. Royal Statist. Soc. A. 124 6 There are theoretical reasons..for regarding the Zipf distribution as an approximation to a more general distribution which Simon has christened the Yule distribution.
1995 Computers & Humanities 29 328/2 The Zipf curve, as refined by B. Mandelbrot, indicates that the relationship between size and frequency is a constant.
1995 Sci. Amer. Mar. 12/3 The researchers..grouped pairs of nucleotides to create words between three and eight base pairs long... In every case, they found that noncoding regions followed the Zipf relation more closely than did coding regions.
2005 Guardian 24 Mar. (Life section) 24/2 To put it crudely, there are a small number of words that appear very frequently: the, of, to, and, a, in, etc. After that, there is a steep decline, followed by tens of thousands of words that appear relatively rarely: palimpsest, lapidary, rodomontade, epalpebrate, and so on. When you graph what is now often called the Zipf distribution, these rare words form the long tail that tapers off to the right.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2021; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1936