On 22/03/2012 21:39, Martin Holmes wrote:
 > HI all,
 >
 > As part of a small pilot project, I'm implementing a set of spelling
 > normalization rules applied through XSLT 2.0 using Saxon 9. One
 > operation that happens extremely frequently is a dictionary lookup;

sounds like you want to use a key then the processor will almost
certainly create an efficient lookup index.

If your dictionary is in a file say dict.xml
<words>
<word>one</word>
<word>hello</word>
</words>

then

<xsl:key name="w" match="word" use="."/>

declares the index and

key('w',$word,doc('dict.xml'))

will return the word if it is in the dictionary.

Cheers,
Martin