A speech encoding comb codebook structure for providing good quality reproduced low bit-rate speech signals in a speech encoding system. The codebook structure requires minimal training, if any, and allows for reduced complexity and memory requirements. The codebook includes a first and at least one additional sub-codebooks, each having a plurality of code-vectors. The codebook may be randomly populated. All even elements may be set to zero in a first codebook, and all odd elements may be set to zero on a second codebook. The resulting comb codebook includes code-vector combination of the code-vectors from the sub-codebooks. In certain embodiments, the code-vectors of the sub-codebooks may contain zero valued elements. In other embodiments where the code-vectors of the sub-codebooks contain only non-zero elements, zero valued elements may be inserted in between the non-zero elements of the sub-codebooks during the forming of the resultant comb codebook. In such an embodiment, the memory requirements would be further reduced in that the zero valued elements need not be stored.