In this economic situation, everyone is interested in savings.  I am exploring here how you can save a few letters when typing.  A simple method exploited by shorthand and speedwriting systems is to find the most frequent blocks of letters (n-grams) and use an abbreviation instead.  The natural consumer’s question is, how can you save most?
Bigrams or trigrams? Suppose, the most frequent bigram (block of two consecutive letters) is th in English.  We could type 1 for it, so “the royal path” would be spelled “1e royal pa1”.  Suppose furthermore, the most frequent trigram (block of three) is ath in English, so using 2 as an abbreviation would give us the spelling “m2 is the p2” for  “math is the path”.  As you can see, the longer block is abbreviated, the more letters are saved.  But longer blocks occur less frequently.  How could you save more, with bigrams or trigrams?