Zipf's Law
Zipf's Law is a principle in linguistics and statistics that suggests a specific relationship between the frequency of words and their rank in a given language. According to this law, the second most common word occurs about half as often as the most common word, the third most common word occurs a third as often, and so on. This creates a predictable pattern where a few words are used very frequently, while many others are used rarely.
This phenomenon can be observed in various datasets, not just in language. For example, city populations and internet traffic often follow a similar distribution, where a small number of items account for a large portion of the total. This pattern highlights the uneven distribution of resources and occurrences in many natural and social systems.