06-18-2026, 07:00 AM
Heaps's law [wikipedia]
Summary
Heaps’ law (also known as Herdan’s law) is an empirical rule in linguistics and information science that describes how the number of unique words (vocabulary size) in a text grows as the total number of words increases. It is usually expressed as V(n) = K·nᵝ, where V(n) is the number of distinct words, n is the total number of words, and K and β are constants estimated from data; for many English texts, β is typically around 0.4–0.6.
The law shows that vocabulary grows sublinearly, meaning that as a document becomes longer, new words continue to appear but at a decreasing rate. It is widely used in computational linguistics, search engines, and natural language processing to predict vocabulary growth, and it is closely related to Zipf’s law, which describes word frequency distributions.
ARTICLE
Summary
Heaps’ law (also known as Herdan’s law) is an empirical rule in linguistics and information science that describes how the number of unique words (vocabulary size) in a text grows as the total number of words increases. It is usually expressed as V(n) = K·nᵝ, where V(n) is the number of distinct words, n is the total number of words, and K and β are constants estimated from data; for many English texts, β is typically around 0.4–0.6.
The law shows that vocabulary grows sublinearly, meaning that as a document becomes longer, new words continue to appear but at a decreasing rate. It is widely used in computational linguistics, search engines, and natural language processing to predict vocabulary growth, and it is closely related to Zipf’s law, which describes word frequency distributions.
ARTICLE
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