Today I was talking with a Chinese friend of mine. She mentioned that books written in Chinese tend to have fewer pages than the same books in English. Each Chinese symbol occupies a space on the page comparable to that of an English letter, but she estimates that the average Chinese word is 1.5 symbols long. The average word in English is around three times that. But there are 40,000 Chinese characters in normal use. Now, just for the sake of comparison, let's say that since each Chinese character is selected from 40,000 that each symbol carries about 15.5 bits. English characters are selected from 26 plus some extra symbols, let's say 32 all together, and so English characters carry about 5 bits. Funny, that 1:3 ratio came up again. The math here is garbage, but, however inaccurate, the numbers do seem to support the claim that "Chinese text has higher information density than English text."