Editing Zipf's law (section)

====Applications====
Zipf's law has been used for extraction of parallel fragments of texts out of comparable corpora.<ref name=moha2016/> [[Laurance Doyle]] and others have suggested the application of Zipf's law for detection of [[alien language]] in the [[search for extraterrestrial intelligence]].<ref name=doyle20162>{{cite journal |last=Doyle |first=L.R. |author-link=Laurance Doyle |date=2016-11-18 |df=dmy-all |title=Why alien language would stand out among all the noise of the universe |journal=[[Nautilus Quarterly]] |url=http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/54/listening-for-extraterrestrial-blah-blah |url-status=dead |lang=en |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200729120031/http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/54/listening-for-extraterrestrial-blah-blah |archive-date=2020-07-29 |access-date=2020-08-30}}</ref><ref name=kersh20212>{{cite book |last=Kershenbaum |first=Arik |author-link=Arik Kershenbaum |date=2021-03-16 |df=dmy-all |title=The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What animals on Earth reveal about aliens – and ourselves |title-link=The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy |publisher=Penguin |isbn=978-1-9848-8197-7 |pages=251–256 |language=en |oclc=1242873084}}</ref>

The frequency-rank word distribution is often characteristic of the author and changes little over time. This feature has been used in the analysis of texts for authorship attribution.<ref name=droo2016/><ref name=droo2019/>

The word-like sign groups of the 15th-century codex [[Voynich manuscript|Voynich Manuscript]] have been found to satisfy Zipf's law, suggesting that text is most likely not a hoax but rather written in an obscure language or cipher.<ref name=boyle2022/><ref name=mont2013/>