Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A pattern of distribution in certain data sets, notably words in a linguistic corpus, by which the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its ranking by frequency. In such a distribution, frequency declines sharply as rank number increases: a small number of items occur very frequently and a large number of items occur very rarely.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun The fact that many types of
data studied in thephysical andsocial sciences can beapproximated with aZipfian distribution .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[After its formulator George Kingsley Zipf, (1902–1950), American linguist.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
After George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), American linguist.
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