The principle was first articulated by the Italian philosopher Guillaume Ferrero in an article in the "Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger", 1 January 1894. About 50 years later this principle was studied by linguist George Kingsley Zipf who wrote "Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology", first published in 1949. He theorised that the distribution of word use was due to tendency to communicate efficiently with least effort and this theory is known as Zipf's Law.