Why are letters shaped the way they are?
Here&#x27;s an interesting revelation that likely has something to do with why letters are shaped the way they are. We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:&#x2F;-+#()&quot;. That&#x27;s 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Nearly all of our glyph&#x27;s can be written as is on a 7 segment display like you would see on a microwave. With just a tiny amount of redesign, our writing system would be exactly 7 bits. Meaning, without any intent or understanding of information theory, our ancestors gradually gravitated towards a writing system that has just 1.36 bits of extraneous code space. This is far to efficient to ignore.<p>It wasn&#x27;t until the digital revolution that the 7-segment pattern belying most letters was apparent. There is no &quot;7 segment font&quot; for the Guttenburg printing press. Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter.<p>Vocabulary almost certainly has evolved in a way that efficiently compresses semantic information. We just haven&#x27;t noticed the 7 segments yet.