On a Distribution Law for Word Frequencies

Abstract In the past, several attempts were made to represent word frequency counts by statistical distribution laws. Of the models suggested, none was singularly successful when applied to a variety of data over the entire length of the observed word distributions. In this article, a new family of compound Poisson distributions 9, 10 is proposed as a model for word frequency counts. Twenty observed distributions quoted in the literature were fitted and the results look most encouraging.