Zipf's Law

Zipf's law ( /ˈzɪf/), an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics, refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. The law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), who first proposed it (Zipf 1935, 1949), though the French stenographer Jean-Baptiste Estoup (1868-1950) appears to have noticed the regularity before Zipf. It was also noted in 1913 by Felix Auerbach.