1. In a language using an alphabet having a first number of characters L forming words of a fixed length W, and a second number N of regular expressions composed only from the characters in the alphabet and the ‘&quest;’ sign, a method of finding a set of matching regular expressions associated with a given query word, comprising the steps of: selecting a base B from 1 to W to divide the words of length W into J&equals;W/B groups; creating a lookup table for each of the J groups, the lookup table for each of the J groups having K&equals;L B entries, each of the K entries being a bitmap of length N; seeding each lookup table for each regular expression from I&equals;1 to I&equals;N; and searching each lookup table to determine the set of regular expressions that match the query word.