Zipf's data on the frequency of Chinese words revisited

Abstract

At the occasion of the 40th anniversary of George Zipf's premature dead, we reanalyse his data on the frequency of Chinese words. We find the best fitting Lotka, Zipf, Bradford and Leimkuhler distribution and show that only Lotka's function is not rejected by a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Using an additional term to Leimkuhler's function leads to a statistically acceptable fit. In this way we can determine a core (nucleus) of most frequently used Chinese words.