Definition

Dem Zipfschen Gesetz zufolge sollen Sprachen dazu neigen, im Laufe der Zeit häufig benutzte Wörter kürzer zu machen.^[1]

Fußnoten

[1] "ZIPF'S LAW: In any culture, social group or organism, SYMBOLIC repertoiries, like words consisting of a finite string of CHARACTERs, either are or converge toward a type/token DISTRIBUTION in which shorter symbols appear more frequent than longer symbols. E. g., compare the frequency of the word "do" with that of "symbol" and with that of "salubrious" in ordinary English. Considering that the length of a string of characters is an indication of the computational effort involved, the LAW suggests that in any SYSTEM of some complexity symbolic repertories are or converge toward a distribution of minimum INFORMATION processing efforts." In: Klaus Krippendorf: A Dictionary of Cybernetics. Annaberg School of Economics. University of Pennsylvania. 1986. Online: https://asc-cybernetics.org/publications/Krippendorff/A_Dictionary_of_Cybernetics.pdf