Dictionary structure, what, how?

Question

Hello to all,
I need to program to load a dictionary from a file that contains the words and it's definitions, I need to load it in a efficient structure because when it will be loaded will be used to do search's in that dictionary, for example:
Dictionary file:
a
and
another
etc
hell
hellsinki
hello
And I need an structure that permit to me search in that dictionary very fast and to do search's like this:
search: he*
and result must be
hell
hellsinki
hello
search: *llo
result:
hello
search: ll
result:
hellsinki
hell
hello
do you know (what structure will be convenient to do this) how can I do this efficiently?
Thanks to all for reading!

Answer 1

I'd use a http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/PropertyResourceBundle.html for the data.
For the search optimization, you can set up a "search" map where the keys are all possible substrings (of two or more lettters?) of your words and the values are a collection with all the words where the key occurs.
eg.
key: "he", value: a collection containing "hell", "hellsinki" (sic), "hello", "another".
etc.
That shifts the processing to setting up the "search" map rather than searching though all words for each search.