Figure 1. Two-regime scaling distribution of word frequency.

The kink in the probability density functions P(f) occurs around f_× ≈ 10⁻⁵ for each corpora analyzed (see legend). (A,B) Data from all years are aggregated into a single distribution. (C,D) P(f) comprising data from only year t = 2000 providing evidence that the distribution is stable even over shorter time frames and likely emerges in corpora that are sufficiently large to be comprehensive of the language studied. For details concerning the scaling exponents we refer to Table I and the main text.