I created a word search game way back in late 1978/early 1979 4KB of RAM. I had about 2KB for storing the word database. And I recall I had about 2,500 words. Which I had to type in by hand.

I used the 26 tables of words trick too, to drop the first letter. I also treated each word being made up of 32 symbols. I called them letters, but they didn't represent individual letters necessarily.

Edit 36 minutes after writing my original comment: Having just checked my notes from December 24th 1978, I need to correct myself and say it was 38 symbols. Though I seem to recall I actually got it down to 32 symbols. I need to keep looking through my notes to refresh my brain on the solution.

A word might end in "ING" so that was considered a single letter/symbol. Words were between four and seven letters long.

Most words took up two bytes, some only took up a single byte, only a few took up three bytes, maybe a few dozen took up four bytes. And I judiciously pruned the database to minimize the words that took up three or four bytes so that I didn't have too many of them. I also packed the bits, so that there was no gaps between words.

And it was all written in 6502 assembly, originally for the CBM PET, and later for the Acorn Atom.

I was 11 years old and so proud of myself for such cleverness. I still have my notes and scribblings, including the digitised versions from all those years back.

Later, when I wrote a much more complex Bookworm type of game I had to take a word list that was about 8MB long, uncompressed, which would just barely fit on the hard drive, and turned it into a trie, which brought it down to just a few dozen kilobytes, which handily fit on a SS/SD 100KB 5+1/4" floppy.