So likely thinking of it in terms of checking a tree based on characters instead of hashes of full words. Which is more viable would likely depend on what kind

So likely thinking of it in terms of checking a tree based on characters instead of hashes of full words. Which is more viable would likely depend on what kind of memory constraints and dictionary size was being considered. Also very implementation dependent, what's the size of the hashes generated? Edit: curiosity got me looking at this for Python, with an answer of "it depends, and both have correct aspects" based on Python's implementation [1]. The hashing varies by string length, the lookup is fixed unless there's a collision and probing, probing will be minimized by growing the dictionary as items are added. In any case, better than O(n) but worse than O(1) and with some possible slowdowns during loading unless you can set an expected final size during initialization. Edit again: since I brought it up, turns out initialization doesn't really matter, resizing is not a speed factor. Relevant discussion starts from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1298636/how-to-set-initial-size-for-a-dictionary-in-python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1298636/how-to-set-initi... [1] http://www.laurentluce.com/posts/python-dictionary-implementation/ http://www.laurentluce.com/posts/python-dictionary-implement...