Thank you so much for submitting this info for me. I should not even come close to this with my string array. the word list is 62,025 words in length..and with an average ...no so conservative length of 8 characters per word.. I get 492,200 characters in length. I saw a piece of code like this recently.. dim as string MyList(100) * 15 if I recall correctly this will make an array of 100 with no entry in the array larger than 15 characters. If I did not do it this way,,and just went with dim as string MyList(100) would this not be memory prohibitive as each array would have a length of 255? thank you for your help. and thanks for the web links for the FAQs Robert