Abstract
ZIPF AND FREQUENCIES G. Th. G. describes here the processes which lead, in the case of a text, to the creation of the " word pyramid " and then on to the " range of frequencies ". He then examines the attempt by the littérature on this subject to give an overall and approximate description of these ranges : by attributing an increasing rank to the decreasing frequencies, a functional relation, rank/frequency, called the " Zipf law " is established. By using the cumulative function V(f) (where the number of frequency forms ≥ f), and by using a logarithmic scale, the frequency table can be represented in its entirety quite clearly by a Pareto diagram. This representation shows both the " accidents " and the remarkable overall regularity of these distributions that no lexicometric work can ignore.