A Chinese Bible Character Carries 8.77 Bits
Answering: “information per Chinese character”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Entropy here is the standard unigram measure: take how often every character occurs, treat those frequencies as probabilities, and compute −Σ p·log₂p. It answers "how unpredictable is the next character", counting nothing but frequency — no grammar, no context, no memory of the previous character.
8.77 bits per character is close to the theoretical maximum for an inventory this size: with 2,996 distinct characters used perfectly evenly the figure would be 11.55, so the Bible's characters are unevenly used but not nearly as unevenly as a small alphabet would be. A word carries 9.62 bits, more than a character — which is the arithmetic behind the claim that Chinese is dense: fewer symbols, each one worth more.
The practical corollary for a learner is the coverage curve: because usage is uneven, 73 characters cover half the text and 971 cover 95%. Entropy is the compact way of saying how much room there is left over in the tail — 2,025 characters share the last twentieth.
| Unit | Entropy (bits) | Distinct units | If used evenly (bits) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Character | 8.77 | 2,996 | 11.55 |
| Word | 9.62 | 11,168 | 13.45 |
| Characters for 50% of the text | — | 73 | — |
| Characters for 95% of the text | — | 971 | — |
Unigram entropy only: it ignores context, so it is an upper bound on how unpredictable real reading is.
Questions
- Is this the same as compression ratio?
- No. Unigram entropy ignores context, and real compressors exploit context heavily, so a compressed file is much smaller than this figure implies.
- How does it compare with English?
- Per symbol, far higher — an English letter's unigram entropy is about four bits. Per unit of meaning the two languages are much closer, which is the honest way to compare them.
- Which corpus is this?
- 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — the text this site publishes, segmented as described in the method below.
Related reference pages
Take it further
- 97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
- Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
- The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
- The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.
How these numbers were produced
- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
- Computed: 2026-09-22, from the text on this site.
These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.
Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).