George Kingsley Zipf (/ˈzɪf/ ZIFF;[1] January 7, 1902 – September 25, 1950), was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages.

[2] He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.

Zipf's discovery of this law in 1935 was one of the first academic studies of word frequency.

[4] Although he originally intended it as a model for linguistics, Zipf later generalized his law to other disciplines.

In particular, he observed that the rank vs. frequency distribution of individual incomes in a unified nation approximates this law, and in his 1941 book, "National Unity and Disunity" he theorized that breaks in this "normal curve of income distribution" portend social pressure for change or revolution.