What is Zipf’s Law – and how can you use it to help teach reading?

Zipf’s Law states that in any language, a tiny handful of words are used all the time (“the”, “of”, “and”), while most words are used very rarely. In fact, the frequency of a word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank: the 2nd most common word appears about half as often as the 1st, the 10th about a tenth as often, and so on.

Pick up any written material, say a book or a newspaper. You will notice that the word “of” , second most common word, will occur half as often as the word “the”, and then “and” would appear 1/3rd as often, the word to 1/4th and so forth.

That’s why this chart drops so sharply on the bottom and then stretches out endlessly to the top.

Not only that. It appears that all languages follow this law, without exception. Therefore, pick up any piece of writing in any language and you will find that the common words occur irreversibly proportional to the rank in their frequency list.

Our programs Reading Kingdom and ASD Reading (as well as Super Sight Words, Spelling Ninja and Story Smarts) are designed to leverage Zipf’s Law by teaching the high frequency words that dominate our written language using our High Frequency Syntax System that teaches these words spelling, meaning, and usage in context.

Reading Kingdom is an online K-3 reading program that uses a new “phonics-plus” model to teach students to read and write at a 3rd grade level with comprehension. Sign up for a complimentary Reading Kingdom trial (or any of our other products) here.

We also have a program for students on the autism spectrum and others who face unique learning challenges called ASD Reading. Sign up for a complimentary trial of ASD Reading.

State & Charter school funding is available! Look for your program and begin using your education funds today!

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