How can this Python Scrabble word finder be made faster?

Question

I have no real need to improve it, it\'s just for fun. Right now it\'s taking about a second on a list of about 200K words.

I\'ve tried to optimize it as much as I know

Answer 1

You can use the fact the /usr/dict/share/words dictionary is sorted to allow you to skip a lot of words in the dictionary without considering them at all.

For instance, suppose a dictionary word starts with "A" and you don't have "A" in the rack. You can do a binary search on the word list for the first word which starts with a "B" and skip all the words inbetween. This will make a big difference in most cases - you'll skip maybe half the words.