Nuts and Bolts: Zipf's Law.

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation we've already looked at and admired, but how about the other Zipf's Law? The one, that is, that's simply called Zipf's Law?

George Kingsley Zipf was a great man. He was such a great man, indeed, that he resisted any temptation to claim to have made up Zipf's Law himself (as it happens, the French stenographer Jean-Baptiste Estoup seems to have got there first, and the German physicist Felix Auerbach seems have been second. But, hey, it was Zipf who did the publicity, wasn't it?).

Zipf's Law works for quite a few different things, but for our purposes the main idea is that the most common word in a (substantial) text will be twice as common as the next most common word, and three times more common than the next commonest word after that, and so on.

The commonest word in the English language is, unsurprisingly the.

Zipf's Law seems to work for all languages, and no one has come up with a theory that's been generally accepted as to why languages are constructed in that way. It might be partly that the commoner a word is the more likely other people are to choose to use it; but no one really knows.

The question you will be asking is, of course, what's the second commonest word in the English language? 

Well, it's be, and then, in order, to, of and and. 

The commonest noun (not counting pronouns, and not counting the word make, which is often a verb) is...can you guess?*

A list of the one hundred commonest words in the English language can be found HERE.

Word To Use Today. Well, why not see how long you go without using the word the? The Old English form of this word was thē.

*It's people, which comes in at about number sixty one.