A system and method are provided which avoid the storage of multiple objects for a single entry in memory, in particular where the entry needs to be stored at least once anyway, a reusable data structure can be implemented which allows both easy and efficient use/reuse of Patricia tree components that are already in use. The data structure can be an integer built from a combination (e.g. concatenation) of a location where the corresponding string has been stored in memory, an offset for finding the word within the string, and a length for extracting all characters from the string that make up the word. Another data component can also be added, which can encode any other feature associated with the word such as a bias level for sorting multiple search results.