Unlike in statistical compression, where Shannon's entropy is a definitive lower bound, no such clear measure exists for the compressibility of repetitive sequences. Since statistical entropy does not capture repetitiveness, ad-hoc measures like the size z of the Lempel-Ziv parse are frequently used to estimate it. The size b ≤ z of the smallest bidirectional macro scheme captures better what can be achieved via copy-paste processes, though it is NP-complete to compute and it is not monotonic upon symbol appends. Recently, a more principled measure, the size γ of the smallest string attractor, was introduced. The measure γ ≤ b lower bounds all the previous relevant ones, yet length-n strings can be represented and efficiently indexed within space O(γ log n γ ), which also upper bounds most measures. While γ is certainly a better measure of repetitiveness than b, it is also NP-complete to compute and not monotonic, and it is unknown if one can always represent a string in o(γ log n) space.In this paper, we study an even smaller measure, δ ≤ γ, which can be computed in linear time, is monotonic, and allows encoding every string in O(δ log n δ ) space because z = O(δ log n δ ). We show that δ better captures the compressibility of repetitive strings. Concretely, we show that (1) δ can be strictly smaller than γ, by up to a logarithmic factor; (2) there are string families needing Ω(δ log n δ ) space to be encoded, so this space is optimal for every n and δ;(3) one can build run-length context-free grammars of size O(δ log n δ ), whereas the smallest (non-run-length) grammar can be up to Θ(log n/ log log n) times larger; and (4) within O(δ log n δ ) space we can not only represent a string, but also offer logarithmic time access to its symbols and efficient indexed searches for pattern occurrences.