Brevity law

The brevity law was originally formulated by the linguist George Kingsley Zipf in 1945 as a negative correlation between the frequency of a word and its size.

Similarly, in a Latin corpus, he found a negative correlation between the number of syllables in a word and the frequency of its appearance.

He claimed that this Law of Abbreviation is a universal structural property of language, hypothesizing that it arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently.

[2][3] Since then, the law has been empirically verified for almost a thousand languages of 80 different linguistic families for the relationship between the number of letters in a written word & its frequency in text.

[6] The origin of this statistical pattern seems to be related to optimization principles and derived by a mediation between two major constraints: the pressure to reduce the cost of production and the pressure to maximize transmission success.

Log per-million word count as a function of wordlength (number of characters) in the Brown Corpus, illustrating Zipf's Brevity Law.