← Why E Is Worth One Point · Lesson 2 of 3
Most words are rare
Count every word in a large body of text and a pattern appears: the most common word is used about twice as often as the second, three times as often as the third, and so on. This is called Zipf's law, after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf.
In English, a few dozen words such as the, of and and make up a large share of everything written, while most words in the dictionary turn up rarely.
Under Zipf's law, the most common word appears about how often compared with the second most common?
A lesson is kept once you've answered the question and written at least 8 words. Nobody grades it; it stays on this device.