Sir, you were in a coma and woke up in the future.
Checking the inclusion of an element in a hashtable is a constant-time operation, or at least constant-ish -- you still need to compare the elements so it's gonna be proportional to the size of the largest one. So the limiting factor here is memory. I suspect keeping a dictionary resident in RAM on a home PC shouldn't have been a big deal for at least 25 years if not more.
I think there should be an even longer period where it would be fine to keep the dictionary on disk and access it for every typed word, because no human could plausibly type fast enough to outpace the throughput of random reads from a hard disk. No idea how long into the past that era would stretch.
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Sir, you were in a coma and woke up in the future.
Checking the inclusion of an element in a hashtable is a constant-time operation, or at least constant-ish -- you still need to compare the elements so it's gonna be proportional to the size of the largest one. So the limiting factor here is memory. I suspect keeping a dictionary resident in RAM on a home PC shouldn't have been a big deal for at least 25 years if not more.
I think there should be an even longer period where it would be fine to keep the dictionary on disk and access it for every typed word, because no human could plausibly type fast enough to outpace the throughput of random reads from a hard disk. No idea how long into the past that era would stretch.
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