collisions we pay price for squeezing large range into small one there' no longer guarantee that two words won' hash to the same array index this is similar to what happened when we added the letter codesbut the situation is nowhere near as bad when we added the lettersthere were only possible results (for words up to lettersnow we're spreading this out into , possible results even soit' impossible to avoid hashing several different words into the same array locationat least occasionally we had hoped that we could have one data item per index numberbut this turns out not to be possible the best we can do is hope that not too many words will hash to the same index perhaps you want to insert the word melioration into the array you hash the word to obtain its index number but find that the cell at that number is already occupied by the word demystifywhich happens to hash to the exact same number (for certain size arraythis situationshown in figure is called collision parchment demystify melioration slander quixotic figure collision it may appear that the possibility of collisions renders the hashing scheme impracticalbut in fact we can work around the problem in variety of ways