Dictionaries built with hashing can handle millions of entries while maintaining high performance.

Always use free() on your nodes and strings to prevent memory leaks in long-running programs.

Keep the table size larger than the number of items to prevent long chains.

Implementing a Dictionary in C Using Hashing In computer science, a (also known as an Associative Array or Map) is a data structure that stores data in key-value pairs. While you could use a linked list or an array to build one, search times would be slow— in the worst case.

Maps that large integer into the range of our array size (using the modulo operator % ).

Each entry in our dictionary will be a node containing the key, the value, and a pointer to the next node (for collisions).