The theory found early adherents in computer science (e.g., knuth,1974; simon, 1955) to achieve efficiencies in dealing with data and computer files, and in linguistics (see Tsonis et al., 1997) to explain language usage. Buckland and Hindle (1969) made an early argument for its applicability to libraries and information work.
Zipf's principle of least effort has been the subject of fruitful research in linguistics for over a half century. It has also been applied in genrral computer science application (e.g., searching) and in bibliography.