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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T00:54:56+00:00

We need to keep some in-memory data structure to keep english word dictionary in

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We need to keep some in-memory data structure to keep english word dictionary in memory.
When the computer/wordweb starts,we need to read dictionary from disk into an in-memory data structure.

This question asks how do we populate from disk to in-memory data structure in typical real world dictionaries say wordweb?

Ideally we would like to keep dictionary in disk in the way, we require it in in-memory, so that we don’t have to spend time building in-memory data structure, we just read it off the disk. But for linked lists, pointers etc, how do we store the same image in disk. Some relative addresses etc would help here?

Typically, is the entire dictionary read and stored in memory. or only part/handlers and leaf page IOs are done, when searching for a specific word.

If somebody wants to help with what that in-memory data structure is typically, please go ahead.

Thanks,

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You mentioned pointers, so I’m assuming you’re using C++; if that’s the case and you want to read directly from disk into memory without having to “rebuild” your data structure, then you might want to look into serialization: How do you serialize an object in C++?

    However, you generally don’t want to load the entire dictionary anyway, especially if it’s a user application. If the user is looking up dictionary words, then reading from disk happens so fast that the user will never notice the “delay.” If you’re servicing hundreds or thousands of requests, then it might make sense to cache the dictionary into memory.

    So how many users do you have?
    What kind of load are you expecting to have on the application?

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