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From: pdg@ihdev.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Need information on data compressio
Message-ID: <1345@ihdev.ATT.COM>
Date: Thu, 23-Apr-87 13:55:20 EST
Article-I.D.: ihdev.1345
Posted: Thu Apr 23 13:55:20 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Apr-87 05:37:19 EST
References: <318@vax1.ccs.cornell.edu> <161200002@uiucdcsb>
Reply-To: pdg@ihdev.UUCP (Joe Isuzu)
Organization: American Nasal Amputation Centre
Lines: 18

In article <161200002@uiucdcsb> kadie@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>I think the number of English words is an order of magnitute
>greater than 2^14-1 (16383), especially if we count all the
>forms of words (word,words,wording,worded) and common proper
>names (California, Fred, ...).

The issue is not the number of words, but the number of often used
words.  My understanding is (although I have no sources to back up
this claim - anyone??) that the average person has a vocabulary of
aprox 10,000 words.  Actually, this would be easy to derive from all
of the news articles (a good cross section of (reasonably :-) educated
people).  I wasn't planning on going through the dictionary AARDVARK=1
etc.  Something more like (THE=1, AN=2, A=3, TO=4, etc).  

-- 

Paul Guthrie
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