The Zipf Mystery

What people said

its_ethan · 2024-07 · Recommendation

There's an entertaining "V-Sauce" video about Zipf's law for anyone wanting to learn a bit more about it and to see other examples of where it shows up: [VIDEO]

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WhateverHappns · 2021-04 · Recommendation

> You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500 words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and understand pretty decently. I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file full of french words with their english counterparts and then displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess. It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys. This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french. Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.( [LINK] ) and here's an interesting video about it: [VIDEO]

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sillysaurusx · 2019-11 · Recommendation

Your shock is warranted. It's actually a very deep question, called the Zipf mystery: [VIDEO] No one really knows why it's true. It's also true across physical constants, not just artificial quantities made up by humans. The same type of distribution pops up in language, in nature, in numbers, popularity of opening chess moves, everywhere.

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