Thus one would expect Voynichese words to be more restricted or less diverse than words in Latin. It was already reported in the past that a large transcribed section of Voynichese had a single word entropy of 10 bits, just like normal language. Here an apparent contradiction appears. If Voynichese uses fewer characters with restricted variability to form a sufficient number of words, then the other languages must be wasteful. This 'wasting of information' will be investigated below.
Summation is over all tokens.
The bits of information can be considered to be distributed over all characters of the word. The ratios in this product give the conditional probabilities counting from the start of the word. It is more interesting to take the average of all words, and this is achieved by replacing the number of bits for one token by the corresponding entropy values. These values will be denoted by Hw1, Hw2, Hw3, Hw4 and HW respectively. The conditional entropies are denoted as hw2, hw3, hw4 and hW and computed as the difference between two absolute entropies.