How is the min_rank used with the flights database
You can put the results of min_rank in to a new column, e.g.:

f2 &lt;- flights %&gt;% 
  mutate(rank = min_rank(dep_delay))


Where showing just the selected rows:

f2 %&gt;% 
  select(dep_delay, rank)


You get this:

# A tibble: 336,776 x 2
   dep_delay   rank
       &lt;dbl&gt;  &lt;int&gt;
 1         2 208140
 2         4 219823
 3         2 208140
 4        -1 164763
 5        -6  48888
 6        -4  94410
 7        -5  69589
 8        -3 119029
 9        -3 119029
10        -2 143247
# ... with 336,766 more rows


Here is another example where you can see all the rows.

aa &lt;- tibble(y = c(9, 8, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6),
             x = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5))

aa %&gt;% 
  mutate(rank = min_rank(y))


Which gives us:

# A tibble: 7 x 3
      y     x  rank
  &lt;dbl&gt; &lt;dbl&gt; &lt;int&gt;
1     9     1     7
2     8     2     6
3     3     3     1
4     4     4     2
5     5     4     3
6     7     4     5
7     6     5     4