The word "bit" is a portmanteau word for Binary digIT

Vaguely disturbing that this is new to anyone on HN. Queue discussion of nibbles and bytes.

The paper is well worth reading if you haven't already done so.

    A Mathematical Theory of Communication

(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...)

Especially page 5, which is a very easy to understand description of EDIT markov chains. But you can use that letter frequency thing to do a really nice easy description of compression.

It's a contraction. Yes, I've read the wikipedia definition of portmanteau, and I still think bit isn't a portmanteau.

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/739/

So