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 the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian 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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