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Asked: 2026-05-15T20:01:52+00:00

Is TRIE the most recommended data structure while designing something like a dictionary for

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Is TRIE the most recommended data structure while designing something like a dictionary for storing words? Any other alternatives that improve either the time or memory performance?

I believe a hash may be good if there’s no collision but then memory requirements start getting bad for overlapping words: over, overlap, overlaps, overlapped, overlapping all occupy exclusive storage while we could share space in trie.

EDIT: Thanks @Moron and to all of you for the very useful answers. I agree — generating the hash key is O(n) and so is a TRIE search. However, for hash things can be worse with chaining adding to the time while for TRIE this will not happen. My concern remains that for every node in a TRIE I need to keep a pointer which may be blowing things if the dictionary size is small.

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can try considering Directed Acyclic Word graph which is basically a trie, but has better memory usage, and according to the wiki, for english, the memory consumption is much lower than a trie.

    Time wise, it is like a trie and is likely better than hash. Not sure where you got the O(logn) time for hash. It should be O(n) for reasonable hashes, where n is the length of the word that is being searched.

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