Why the most common word is twice as common as the next: Zipf's law
30seconds
Sort every word in a book from most to least common and a pattern appears: the top word is about twice as common as the second, three times as common as the third, and so on. This is Zipf's law, named after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf.
Count the words in your own text, then let a monkey type random letters and spaces. Its gibberish draws a surprisingly similar line, which says something about how weak a test that straight line really is.
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