title: Storing a dictionary in a hashtable
body: <p>I have an assignment that I am working on, and I can't get a hold of the professor to get clarity on something. The idea is that we are writing an anagram solver, using a given set of words, that we store in 3 different dictionary classes: Linear, Binary, and Hash.</p>
  
  <p>So we read in the words from a textfile, and for the first 2 dictionary objects(linear and binary), we store the words as an ArrayList...easy enough.</p>
  
  <p>But for the HashDictionary, he want's us to store the words in a HashTable. I'm just not sure what the values are going to be for the HashTable, or why you would do that. The instructions say we store the words in a Hashtable for quick retrieval, but I just don't get what the point of that is. Makes sense to store words in an arraylist, but I'm just not sure of how key/value pairing helps with a dictionary.</p>
  
  <p>Maybe i'm not giving enough details, but I figured maybe someone would have seen something like this and its obvious to them.</p>
  
  <p>Each of our classes has a contains method, that returns a boolean representing whether or not a word passed in is in the dictionary, so the linear does a linear search of the arraylist, the binary does a binary search of the arraylist, and I'm not sure about the hash....</p>