Logarithmical: Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of emoji

Back in the mists of time, I wrote about a peculiar property of words called Zipf’s Law. The idea is quite simple: the frequency at which different words occur in any large body of work, ordered from the most common to the least common, follows a predictable pattern. This is true across languages, and even in some texts, such as that in the Voynich Manuscript, that we haven’t yet deciphered.1

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It’s (rest of world) publication day for Face with Tears of Joy!

It’s publication day again! Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is published today in the UK and other non-US territories.

You can order a copy from Norton, Amazon, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, Blackwell’s or Topping & Company. (If you’re ever in Linlithgow, Scotland, drop into my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd — I’ll try to sign a few copies for them.)

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