Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) is a universal lossless compression algorithm created by Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It was published by Welch in 1984 as an improvement to the LZ78 algorithm published by Lempel and Ziv in 1978. Claimed advantages include: simple to implement and the potential for high throughput in a hardware implementation.
A large English text file can typically be compressed via LZW to about half its original size.