Zipf’s law, an observed statistical property of language that, like so much of the best math, lies somewhere between miracle and coincidence.1 It states that in any large body of text, a word’s popularity (its place in the lexicon, with 1 being the highest ranking) multiplied by the number of times it shows up, is the same for every word in the text. Or, very elegantly: rank × number = constant This law holds for the Bible, the collected lyrics of ’60s pop songs, and the canonical corpus of English literature (the Oxford English Corpus),
