Zipf's Law: Frequencies of Words If you rank order words in a text by how frequent (# of times a word appears) they are (#1 being most frequent) and then relate this to the frequency of the word, you get Zipf's Law Zipf's Law: where F is the frequency of a word, <PERSON> is a constant, <PERSON> is the rank, and α is known as the power law exponent For all languages α ≈ 1