4 ms·

What does "rank" mean in this context?

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• jonquark 10y ago
  Number in the list. So the first item in the list occurs roughly twice as often as the second item and roughly 9 times as often as the ninth item. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, I looked at the Wikipedia page in response to this story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
• webmaven 10y ago
  The Ordinal of the position in the sorted list of observed values.
  • imagist 10y ago
    So basically if you order by frequency, order correlates with frequency? Isn't that just two ways of saying the same thing? Isn't it obvious? I don't get why we would need a law for that so I feel like I'm missing some detail.
    • jjaredsimpson 10y ago
      Not just correlates. rank * frequency = constant
      • imagist 10y ago
        Ah, that is the missing piece!