Tries for dictionaries are the simplest method. However, it limits the search method to forward-only. For more sophisticated dictionary searches there is DAWG:

Tries for dictionaries are the simplest method. However, it limits the search method to forward-only. For more sophisticated dictionary searches there is DAWG: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_word_graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_word_graph http://www.pathcom.com/~vadco/cwg.html http://www.pathcom.com/~vadco/cwg.html (a highly compressed DAWG derivative)