Given a corpus of language, the frequency of a word (how many times it shows up in the corpus) is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table of words. For example, ‘the’ appears 2x as much as ‘of’ (7% of words, 3.5% of words respectively). This is another example of the Pareto principle.
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An exponential plot where the 80% of Y comes from 20% of X.