ANONYMOUS wrote: There certainly are more complicated implementations of hashtables that 'grow' as the number of their elements pass some threshold. Extending the initial vector of pointers to the lists is the easy part, but then you also have to determine where, in the extended hashtable, that each list will now belong (each string on each list *may* now have a different value when hashed). The usual (easiest) approach is to allocate a second hashtable, migrate all the old contents over to it, then delete the original hashtable.