Work out word frequency rank instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Zipf's law says frequency is inversely proportional to rank, so the hundredth most common word appears about a hundredth as often as the first. With the top word at 6% of a million word corpus, rank 100 appears roughly 600 times - a relative frequency of 0.06%. The Zipf scale expresses this logarithmically for lexical research.
Zipf's law
frequency is proportional to 1 / rank
Zipf value
Zipf = log10(occurrences per billion words), here scaled from the corpus
It emerges from any process balancing communication effort against expressiveness, and appears in city sizes and income distributions too.
The top 1000 word families cover about 75% of general English text and the top 3000 about 85%, which is why frequency-ordered vocabulary study is efficient.