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I wonder which would actually faster - binary search on the standard ordered alphabet or going linearly in order of letter frequency.

Even better - some hybrid algorithm that goes through the most common letters then goes into binary search for the remaining letters (many of which appear at approximately equal frequency)

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Binary search in unbalanced tree with shorter branches to more frequently used letters will be probably best (this is really huffman coding, isn't it?

You could probably also have a tree of the ~32 most common words. At the very beginning you could have a branch to choose whether you want to pick the 'word' tree or the 'letter' tree.

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