You cannot win much by abbreviating only words

You cannot win much by abbreviating only words. To save a lot of keystrokes requires concentrating on phrase abbreviations.

This may sound intuitive but let us try to understand why. The table shown below analyzes a typical medical report. The report has 3,317 words making a total of 21,825 characters. The average word has 5.58 letters, or 6.58 if you include the space at the end.

The letter-length statistics are shown on the left: For example, there are 388 words of 4 letters and they represent 11.7% of all words.

Now let's see what we can achieve by abbreviating words. The column Short shows optimistic assumptions: We assume a short form of 2 letters for words of 2 to 4 letters; 3 letters for words of 5 or 6 letters; and 4 letters for all words with 7 to 17 letters. The column Spaced shows the letters of the short form plus the space at the end. Now see the results after the table.

Letters	Words	Percent	Short	Spaced	Typed	Full
1	51	1.54%	1	2	102	102
2	324	9.77%	2	3	972	972
3	771	23.24%	2	3	2313	3084
4	388	11.70%	2	3	1164	1940
5	296	8.92%	3	4	1184	1776
6	295	8.89%	3	4	1180	2065
7	306	9.23%	4	5	1530	2448
8	270	8.14%	4	5	1350	2430
9	214	6.45%	4	5	1070	2140
10	197	5.94%	4	5	985	2167
11	70	2.11%	4	5	350	840
12	80	2.41%	4	5	400	1040
13	29	0.87%	4	5	145	406
14	13	0.39%	4	5	65	195
15	4	0.12%	4	5	20	64
16	6	0.18%	4	5	30	102
17	3	0.09%	4	5	15	54
Total:	3,317				12,875	21,825
Average Letters: 6.58				Keystrokes Saved: 41.01%

The column Typed shows the number of characters typed and the column Full shows the characters obtained after expansion.

With these optimistic assumptions, we typed 12,875 to get 21,825 characters, which is a saving of 41%. This is optimistic in the sense that short forms for long words are likely to have more than 4 characters. Moreover, this assumes that every word is abbreviated. In reality, as every word does not get abbreviated, people who exclusively use word abbreviations are more likely to save 25% to at most 30% of keystrokes and definitely not more than the 41% upper bound.

So how can you save more keystrokes? — The o