Century Old Mystery of The Zipf's Law (And A Cool Experiment)

Yes that's not a typo at the title, there is something called the Zipf's law, and it's quite .. weird.

In fact, in its origins, it is a law pertaining linguistic patterns used in languages, and it governs how often do we use specific words and their natural frequency of occurrence.

And the reason of its mystery, is due to its surprising patterns that not only apply to English language, but essentially to any other language, including "Esperanto" (in case you did not know about Esperanto, it's a constructed language that goes back to 1887 - I didn't either till a month ago, when some fun guy was conversing with it on steemit and I learned about it, google translate even supports it! For more info on it, check out this wikipedia article).

And back to topic...
Yet while this will probably get a bit lengthy - don't forget the experiment at the end! :)

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What is Zipf's Law?

The Of And To A, In Is I That, It For You Was, With On As Have, But Be They

No I did not go on a weird rant with that sentence above, nor did I lose my sentence-creating grammatical skills all of a sudden. In fact, that sentence above represents the most widely used words, in order, of the English language. Commas are pointless, but just to confuse you a bit lol

And that concept is at the core of Zipf's law.

In fact, the law identifies that the frequency of a word's usage in the studied context is inversely proportionate to its rank.
This applies into any context in which the words are considered. Whether it's the whole English literature, Shakespeare's work, a book, or even this article.

So for instance, the second most ranked word would appear half the times of the most used word. The third most ranked would appear a third of the top used word. See Image below for a sample chart

Chart showing the rank vs frequency of words appearance

Let's take a more concrete example. A study on the Brown Corpus of the American English found that the word "the" (similarly to our weird sentence above) is the most used word, at 7% of the time (69,971 out of around 1 million words). The second most used word was "at", at around 3.5% of the time (36,411 appearances), and then "and" at close to 2.34% (28,852 appearances). More examples in the graphs below.

Most often, the law and its charts are plotted as log value points of (frequency - rank), such as the below, which shows results based upon ranking words and frequencies across 30 wikipedias' first 10 million words

Plot of rank v/s frequency for first 10 million words across 30 Wikipedias

Not even Shakespeare, Dickens,... escape the Zipf's Law! Check out below chart.

Chart of frequency - rank within the works of different English Literature authors

Brief History

The Law is actually named after American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who even though was not the first to identify its occurrence (prior separate works were done by Jean-Baptiste Estoup, and also Felix Auerbach around 1913), yet he was the first to popularize it and try to explain it between 1935 and 1949.

Can it get weirder?

Zipf's law appears to apply everywhere! City population ranks across countries, website traffics, last names, number of phone calls received, income rankings, corporation sizes, ... even rates at which we forget !

The law itself is considered a somewhat discrete form of the pareto distribution (see more info about Pareto Distribution here), which leads to the Pareto Principle.
The latter is actually what dictates the famous 20-80 principle,
i.e., 20% of the causes are responsible for 80% of the outcome
such as:

• 20% of the population has 80% of the riches
• 20% of the words account for 80% of the texts.
• 20% of your customers, account for 80% of your profit.

Explanation?

Well, the reason we just called it mystery, is because, as of yet, there is no well understood explanation as to why it occurs.

Several attempts have been made to explain it. Begining with Zipf himself, who generally attributed this to the "principle of least effort".
Whereby his theory was that people attempt to utilize lesser words naturally to explain themselves, since it's well, easier. Yet listeners needed more larger vocabulary to provide better specifics to further understand, so as their task becomes, easier too. And hence it is the compromise between speaking and listening is what results in few words being used more often, and the most words being used infrequently.
Other recent studies along the same lines considered that the use of short words frequently helps minimize the load on the listener's processing.

Later research(works of Wentian Li and then Benoit Mandelbrot) yet suggested that this is a very normal and mathematical common way for sentences and even random texts to appear. They even suggested that typing random words on a keyboard without any sense would yield similar results as to Zipf's law, due to the probability of shorter lettered words to occur more frequently than others. Yet, the caveat with this approach is that natural language is deterministic, and is due to factual data and information being conveyed, which negates the fact that it would apply to a random set and based on simple probabilistic formula. Point in case is that this approach fails to explain how names of months, planets, or even chemical elements follow zipf's law distribution. See photo below showcasing said distribution

Zipf's law applying to a: months, b: planets, c: elements occurrences

Another reasoning has linked Zipf's law to Preferrential Attachment, which can simply be explained in the rich get richer, the successful get more successful. So a word getting used often, will get used more often. The more views a video gets, the more likely it is to get recommended. The more views a post (steemit post, maybe lol) gets, the more upvotes it could get.

Own Experiment with this text

So I decided to run a cool Zipf's experiment with this text to see how it ranks. I've used this free site for counting the words: https://wordcounter.com/
And then my results came as follows:

Plotting in onto a chart also gave the following:

So there you have it .. a Zipf, with "the" most used, and the typical words being the most frequent too :)

Hey, your turn! you might want to do your own experiment with your own text or any of your own posts, and show me your top ranking 5 words and their count!

@mcfarhat

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References:

1. Wikipedia - Zipf's Law
2. Vsauce Youtube Video - The Zipf's Mystery
3. Wikipedia - Esperanto

Photo Credits:

• Image 1
• Image 2
• Image 3
• Image 4
• Table 5 and Chart 6 - Own Work.

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