  The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of
words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with
fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is
measured and used as an input in a predictive theory. For a text written in
English, the word-frequency distribution is broad and fat-tailed, whereas if
the words are only represented by their first letter the distribution becomes
exponential. Both distribution are well predicted by the theory, as is the
whole sequence obtained by consecutively representing the words by the first
L=6,5,4,3,2,1 letters. Comparisons of texts written by Chinese characters and
the same texts written by letter-codes are made and the similarity of the
corresponding frequency-distributions are interpreted as a consequence of the
multiple meanings of Chinese characters. This further implies that the
difference of the shape for word-frequencies for an English text written by
letters and a Chinese text written by Chinese characters is due to the coding
and not to the language per se.
