I’ve got a large array of words in Javascript (~100,000), and I’d like to

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Asked: May 26, 20262026-05-26T22:38:25+00:00 2026-05-26T22:38:25+00:00

I’ve got a large array of words in Javascript (~100,000), and I’d like to

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I’ve got a large array of words in Javascript (~100,000), and I’d like to be able to quickly return a subset of them based on a text pattern.

For example, I’d like to return all the words that begin with a pattern so typing hap should give me ["happy", "happiness", "happening", etc, etc], as a result.

If it’s possible I’d like to do this without iterating over the entire array.

Something like this is not working fast enough:

// data contains an array of beginnings of words e.g. 'hap'
$.each(data, function(key, possibleWord) {
 found = $.inArray(possibleWord, words);
 // do something if found
}

Any ideas on how I could quickly reduce the set to possible matches without iterating over the whole word set? The word array is in alphabetical order if that helps.