Words as well as characters as encoding units

From	Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de>
Newsgroups	comp.compression
Subject	Words as well as characters as encoding units
Date	2012-05-05 10:26 +0200
Organization	albasani.net
Message-ID	<jo2o6f$nd9$1@news.albasani.net> (permalink)

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If I don't err, the Huffman compression is certainly applicable to
words instead of characters as units of encoding. Now, in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English one reads:

   The Reading Teachers Book of Lists claims that the first 25 words
   make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and
   that the first 100 make up about one-half of all written material.

While this could be some over-estimation (I don't know), wouldn't
this anyway imply that the optimal Huffman compression would have
encoding units that consist partly of some words, with the rest
being characters?

Thanks in advance.

M. K. Shen

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Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 10:26 +0200
  Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units James Dow Allen <jdallen2000@yahoo.com> - 2012-05-05 02:41 -0700
    Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 15:06 +0200
      Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Thomas Richter <thor@math.tu-berlin.de> - 2012-05-05 17:05 +0200
        Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 19:42 +0200
          Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-05-05 18:33 +0000
            Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 21:22 +0200
              Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Thomas Richter <thor@math.tu-berlin.de> - 2012-05-05 21:31 +0200
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 22:19 +0200
              Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-05-05 20:17 +0000
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 22:36 +0200
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-05-05 21:29 +0000
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> - 2012-05-05 23:52 +0200
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Niels Fröhling <spamtrap@adsignum.com> - 2012-05-08 00:42 -0600
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> - 2012-05-08 08:19 +0000
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units Niels Fröhling <spamtrap@adsignum.com> - 2012-05-09 15:14 -0600
                Re: Words as well as characters as encoding units James Dow Allen <jdallen2000@yahoo.com> - 2012-05-09 22:17 -0700

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