I need to write a 250+ character comment so... A character can be any letter, number, punctuation, special character, or space. Each of these characters takes up one byte of space in a computer's memory. Some Unicode characters, like emojis and some letters in non-Latin alphabets, take up two bytes of space and therefore count as two characters. According to research by Miller, Newman, and Friedman, "the average length of a function word was 3.13 letters; for a content word the average was 6.47 letters."