Zipf's Law for Natural and Random Texts
Zipf's Law for Natural and Random Texts
Zipf's law states that the frequency of words in natural languages is approximately inversely proportional to their rank (or frequency of use). This Demonstration compares Zipf's law for natural language texts to that of randomized versions of these texts, obtained by either randomly permuting all characters (including spaces) of the text, or by applying a transposition cipher to the text. In most cases, the fit of Zipf's law for the randomized versions is similar to that of the original texts.