Way to store a large dictionary with low memory footprint + fast lookups (on Android)

Question

I\'m developing an android word game app that needs a large (~250,000 word dictionary) available. I need:

• reasonably fast look ups e.g. constant time preferable, n

Answer 1

You'll be wanting some sort of trie. Perhaps a ternary search trie would be good I think. They give very fast look-up and low memory usage. This paper gives some more info about TSTs. It also talks about sorting so not all of it will apply. This article might be a little more applicable. As the article says, TSTs

combine the time efficiency of digital tries with the space efficiency of binary search trees.

As this table shows, the look-up times are very comparable to using a hash table.