HashSet of Strings taking up too much memory, suggestions…?

Question

I am currently storing a list of words (around 120,000) in a HashSet, for the purpose of using as a list to check enetered words against to see if they are spelt correctly,

Answer 1

The problem is by design: Storing such a huge amount of words in a HashSet for spell-check-reasons isn't a good idea:

You can either use a spell-checker (example: http://softcorporation.com/products/spellcheck/ ), or you can buildup a "auto-wordcompletion" with a prefix tree ( description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie ).

There is no way to reduce memory-usage in this design.

Answer 2

Check out bloom filters or cuckoo hashing. Bloom filter or cuckoo hashing?

I am not sure if this is the answer for your question but worth looking into these alternatives. bloom filters are mainly used for spell checker kind of use cases.