Zipf's Law, though would seem to apply to only a few phenomena, has actually been discovered to apply to a multitude of events. The first pattern that George Zipf discovered was the English language which the occurrence of words used in common speech follows the distribution pattern. "The" is used approximately twice as often as the second most common word, and three times as much as the third, and so on. However, city sizes in the United States have also met this pattern throughout history, even though the cities in the ranking have changed. New York the largest city, was both four times as large as Los Angles in 1950, when it was the fourth largest city, and four times as large as the fourth city in 1998, Houston. This pattern also holds true for natural occurrences such as earthquakes. The applications of this simplistic relationship seem to be never ending.