1. A method of building a compressed lexicon, comprising: receiving a word list and word-dependent data associated with each word in the word list; selecting a word from the word list; generating an index entry identifying a location in a lexicon memory for holding the selected word; encoding the selected word and its associated word-dependent data to obtain encoded words and associated encoded word-dependent data; and writing the encoded word and its associated word-dependent data at the identified location in the lexicon memory.