Abstract Zipf's Law of Abbreviation–the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are
simpler than less frequent ones–has been shown to hold at the level of words in many …

Abstract The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the
relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the …

Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding.
The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has …

A writing system is a graphic code, ie, a system of standardized pairings between symbols
and meanings in which symbols take the form of images that can endure. The visual …

Words that are used more frequently tend to be shorter. This statement is known as Zipf's law
of abbreviation. Here we perform the widest investigation of the presence of the law to date …

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient
communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort …

We demonstrate a substantial improvement on one of the most celebrated empirical laws in
the study of language, Zipf's 75-y-old theory that word length is primarily determined by …

The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as
short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding–under an …

Zipf's law states that if words of a language are sorted in the order of decreasing frequency
of usage, a word's frequency is inversely proportional to its rank, or sequence number in the …

Zipf's law on word frequency and Heaps' law on the growth of distinct words are observed in
Indo-European language family, but it does not hold for languages like Chinese, Japanese …