diff --git a/wordfreq_builder/rules.ninja b/wordfreq_builder/rules.ninja
index 7aefa4e..f039705 100644
--- a/wordfreq_builder/rules.ninja
+++ b/wordfreq_builder/rules.ninja
@@ -101,4 +101,4 @@ rule cat
   command = cat $in > $out
 
 rule extract_reddit
-  command = bunzip2 -c $in | $JQ -r '.body' | fgrep -v '[deleted]' | sed 's/&gt;/>/g' | sed 's/&lt;/</g' | sed 's/&amp;/\&/g' > $out
+  command = bunzip2 -c $in | $JQ -r '.body' | fgrep -v '[deleted]' | sed 's/&gt;/>/g' | sed 's/&lt;/</g' | sed 's/&amp;/\&/g' | gzip -c > $out
diff --git a/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/ninja.py b/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/ninja.py
index ad433aa..ef8c368 100644
--- a/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/ninja.py
+++ b/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/ninja.py
@@ -246,7 +246,7 @@ def reddit_deps(dirname_in, languages):
     path_in = pathlib.Path(dirname_in)
     for filepath in path_in.glob('*/*.bz2'):
         base = filepath.name[:-4]
-        transformed_file = wordlist_filename('reddit', 'en', base + '.txt')
+        transformed_file = wordlist_filename('reddit', 'en', base + '.txt.gz')
         add_dep(lines, 'extract_reddit', str(filepath), transformed_file)
         count_file = wordlist_filename('reddit', 'en', base + '.counts.txt')
         add_dep(lines, 'count', transformed_file, count_file)
diff --git a/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/word_counts.py b/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/word_counts.py
index a21e1f3..47de7e5 100644
--- a/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/word_counts.py
+++ b/wordfreq_builder/wordfreq_builder/word_counts.py
@@ -24,12 +24,15 @@ def count_tokens(filename):
     containing '�'.
     """
     counts = defaultdict(int)
-    with open(filename, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace') as infile:
-        for line in infile:
-            line = URL_RE.sub('', line.strip())
-            for token in simple_tokenize(line):
-                counts[token] += 1
-
+    if filename.endswith('gz'):
+        infile = gzip.open(filename, 'rt', encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')
+    else:
+        infile = open(filename, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')
+    for line in infile:
+        line = URL_RE.sub('', line.strip())
+        for token in simple_tokenize(line):
+            counts[token] += 1
+    infile.close()
     return counts