ZIPFの法則は、もともと定量的言語学の観点から定式化されており、単語の頻度は周波数テーブルのランクに反比例していると述べています。

したがって、最も頻繁な単語は、2番目に頻繁な単語の約2倍の頻度で発生します。
Zipf's law was originally formulated in terms of quantitative linguistics, stating that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table.

Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.