Comman word and what array, hash table to use

[liunx]

hey guys.

Need some help and opinion.

first i am creating a knowledge base and am at the point of removing stop words and assigning common words.

by common words i mean eg

woman = women, girl, lady etc
man = boy, men, man etc

I need the fastest possible way of taking the users word like man and going through the common words to identify the common word.

now from java i believe hash tables are the fastest but i am not to sure how to implement them in the way i require.

i gather i need an id with the first one being the word that is to be used and then the words that represent it.

is this how it would be represented?

Does anyone have tutorials on how to do this...would this be multidimensional?

A quick question what would be quicker to populate the hash/array...either xml or straight from the database and would i put it into some sort of global so it preloaded at the start or how would i "Save" it so that it doesnt have to be reloaded on each submittion of a search?

sorry about all the questions but not to sure on how this would be done.

thanks for any help.just wondering if anyone knows any tutorial as i need to create arrays with multiple arrays.