Why the most common words are the shortest: Zipf's two laws of language

Count the words in almost any long text and a strange pattern appears: the most common word turns up about twice as often as the second, three times as often as the third, and so on. In a million words of 1961 American English, the alone was about 7% of everything.

That is Zipf's law, and it has a sibling: the busier a word is, the shorter it tends to be. Paste in your own text and watch both laws appear, then see why a typing monkey makes the story more complicated.