title: What's the largest size a hashtable should be?
body: <p>How large is too large for the average programming language's implementation of a hashtable?</p>
  
  <p>Say I wanted to create a program that plays the game <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiritori" rel="nofollow">Shiritori</a>. After the user inputs a word, the program needs to look up into a dictionary if that word exists. To prevent constant flat-file reads, is loading 100,000+ words into a hashtable at the program start a wise solution?</p>