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"when observations are ranked from most to least frequent, the frequency of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank"

Is this just a complex way of saying "when you put items in ascending order, that order's the inverse of the same items listed in descending order", or have I missed something?

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From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law

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.: the rank-frequency distribution is an inverse relation.

Ah; I'd interpreted inversely proportional to mean "y = -mx" rather than "y = m / x", forgetting my GCSE maths terms :S. Thanks for the pointer.

the product of rank and frequency is constant.

equivalently

a plot of rank v frequency is a hyperbola, which implies a log-log plot is linear.

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