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For anyone still reading, out of curiosity, I reran the experiment on my Debian box:

  $ </usr/share/dict/words  gzip --best | wc -c
  261255
  $ </usr/share/dict/words iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16le | gzip --best | wc -c
  303404
A bit over a 16% size increase form converting the "wamerican" dictionary to UTF-16LE and then compressing.



For the large dictionary it’s a tiny bit worse, but still rounds to 16%:

  $ < /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane gzip --best | wc --bytes
  1778330
  $ < /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16le | gzip --best | wc --bytes
  2061457




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