For example, named after George Zipf, Zipf’s law shows that the most frequent word used in a language will occur twice as often as the second-most-frequent word, three times as often as the third-most-frequent word, and so on. In the English language, the is the most frequent word used and accounts for nearly 5 percent of all words, followed by of, which accounts for just over 3.5 percent, and then and, which accounts for 2.4 percent. It’s a surprisingly consistent law that holds true throughout nearly all languages. The takeaway for a new speaker is that by just learning the top 135 words of
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