prefix tree

A prefix tree is like a tree house where you can store lots of words and find them easily. It's perfect for playing word games like hangman or Scrabble.

Imagine you have a big tree with lots of branches. Each branch has a letter on it. So if you have the word "cat," you start at the top of the tree and go down the first branch that has a "c." Then you go down the "a" branch, then the "t" branch.

The cool thing about prefix trees is that you can find all the words that start with a certain prefix quickly. Let's say you want to find all the words that start with "ca" - you just follow the "c" branch down to the "a" branch, and all the branches that come after that are words that start with "ca."

So if you had a list of all the words in the dictionary on your prefix tree, it would be easy to look up any word that you wanted. It's like having a magic spell that can find any word you need!