ABSTRACT
Zipf’s Law [also called Principle of Least Effort] principle defined in the 1930s by the Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who found that many phenomena in language could be explained as the result of an inborn tendency in the human species to make the most of its communicative resources with the least expenditure of effort (physical, cognitive, and social). This tendency was independent of individual and culture. It explains, Zipf claimed, why speakers minimize articulatory effort by shortening the length of words and utterances. At the same time, people want to be able to interpret the meaning of words and
utterances unambiguously and with least effort. Zipf demonstrated that there exists an intrinsic interdependence between the length of a specific word
(in number of sounds or letters) and its rank order in the language (its position in order of its frequency of occurrence in texts of all kinds). The higher the rank order of a word (the more frequent it is in actual usage), the more it tends to be “shorter” (made up with fewer phonemes). For example, articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, or), and other function words (to, it), which have a high rank order in English (and in any other language for that matter), are typically monosyllabic, consisting of one to three phonemes. What is even more intriguing is that this “miniaturization” force does not stop at the level of function words, as Zipf and others subsequently found. It can be seen to manifest itself, above all else, in the tendency for phrases that come into popular use to become abbreviated (FYO, UNESCO, Hi, Bye, ad, photo, Mr., Mrs., Dr., 24/7, etc.) or changed into acronyms (aka, VCR, DNA, laser, GNP, IQ, VIP, etc.). It can also be seen in the creation of tables, technical and scientific notation systems, indexes, footnotes, bibliographic traditions, and so on and so forth. In effect, the general version of Zipf’s Law proclaims that the more frequent or necessary a form for communicative purposes, the more likely it is to be rendered “compressed” or “economical” in
physical structure. And the reason for this seems to be an inherent tendency in the human species to expend the least effort possible in representation and communication.
