George Kingsley Zipf

George Kingsley Zipf was an American linguist and philologist best known for Zipf's Law, which suggests that in languages, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For example, the second most common word occurs about half as often as the first, the third about one-third as often, and so on. This phenomenon illustrates patterns in language usage and can be applied to various fields, including information theory and economics, highlighting how certain elements are disproportionately common compared to others in a given dataset.