  We address the problem of constructing a fast lossless code in the case when
the source alphabet is large. The main idea of the new scheme may be described
as follows. We group letters with small probabilities in subsets (acting as
super letters) and use time consuming coding for these subsets only, whereas
letters in the subsets have the same code length and therefore can be coded
fast. The described scheme can be applied to sources with known and unknown
statistics.
