Catching The Long Tail

摘要

The long tail in statistics is the infrequent occurrences that together make up a mass greater than the frequent occurrences. 'The' is the most common word in English language. About 12% of all words are 'the' (while 'barracks' occurs less than 1 out of 50,000 words), but cumulatively, words roughly as rare as 'barracks' make up about a third of all text. These rare words are the long tail in English vocabulary as per Wikipedia. More recently, Wired Editor-in-chief has used this phrase in relation to blogs and businesses.