Before revision: The Yule–Simon distribution that results from preferential attachment (intuitively, "the rich gets richer" and "success breeds success") simulates a broken power law and has been shown to "very well capture" word frequency versus rank distributions.
After revision: The Yule–Simon distribution that results from preferential attachment (intuitively, "the rich get richer" and "success breeds success") simulates a broken power law and has been shown to "very well capture" word frequency versus rank distributions.