User blog comment:Uknownada/Zipf's Law and One Piece/@comment-53507-20151112042127/@comment-972068-20151112050525

Imagine having a deck of 31 cards. In the deck, there are 16 cards labeled A, 8 labeled B, 4 labeled C, 2 labeled D, and 1 labeled E.

A is the most frequent card in the deck. B is the second-most frequent, and so on. Zipf's Law determines that B will appear about 1/2 as often as A. C will appear about 1/3 as often as A. Basically, take the ranking each card has (let's call it x), and divide A by that number. This will show how often x appears in the deck.

I hope that makes sense. It kind of is witchcraft.