The most frequently occurring word in written English is “the,” followed by “of” and then “and.” Zipf ranked all the words in a large variety of written texts in this way and then plotted their frequency of usage. The resulting curve had an odd shape. Instead of falling gradually from the most common word to the least common, as one might expect, it plunged sharply at first and then leveled off into a long and gently sloping tail—rather like the path of a ski jumper. This shape indicates extreme inequality: a few hundred top-ranked words do almost all the work, while the large majority
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