The most common word is used twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common ...

Zipf’s law of abbreviation was only found to apply to blue whales and humpback whales, though only five species could be ...

Researchers have discovered that humpback whales and humans have something fundamental in common: Their songs, like our ...

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the ...

We had a particularly great week for new research findings, in my opinion. I mean, stories like a 2% improvement in a ...

For all the world’s linguistic diversity, human languages still obey some universal patterns. These run even deeper than ...

But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are ...

Mathematics and physics have long been regarded as the ultimate languages of the universe, but what if their structure ...

A key discovery was that whale song follows Zipf’s Law—a principle in human language where the most frequently used words ...

This paper analyzes one of the classic empirical regularities in the literature on firm growth: Zipf's law of the firm size distribution. Firstly, using firm-level data and decomposing the sample by ...

Two studies reveal that the communication systems of most cetaceans examined adhere to the principles of efficiency and ...

Despite humans and whales being separated by millions of years of evolution, our vocalizations follow the same principle outlined in Zipf’s law Margherita Bassi Daily Correspondent All human ...