Uses Ternary search trees can be used to solve many problems in which a large number of strings must be stored and retrieved in an arbitrary order. Some of the most common or most useful of these are below: Anytime a trie could be used but a less memory-consuming structure is preferred. A quick and space-saving data structure for mapping strings to other data. To implement auto-completion. As a spell check. Near-neighbor searching (of which spell-checking is a special case). As a database especially when indexing by several non-key fields is desirable. In place of a hash table. See also Three-way radix quicksort Trie Binary search tree Hashtable References External links Ternary Search Trees page with papers (by Jon Bentley and Robert Sedgewick) about ternary search trees and algorithms for "sorting and searching strings" Ternary Search Tries – a video by Robert Sedgewick TST.java.html Implementation in Java of a TST by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne Trees (data structures) Search algorithms