What is tries means?

A trie, or a prefix tree, is a tree-like data structure wherein each node stores a character or a part of a key. It is often used to solve problems related to dictionaries, autocomplete, and search engines. Trie's nodes have varying numbers of pointers that correspond to each element in the alphabet or a set of characters.

Trie is an efficient data structure for searching for words or prefixes in a dictionary because it can eliminate entire segments of keys that do not match the search term. Tries are space-efficient compared to other search structures and are used in several applications like spelling correction, IP routing, and phone book.

However, the functionality of the trie comes at the cost of storage space, as it needs to store a lot of nodes. Tries can be challenging to implement and optimize for large datasets, though variation in type helps overcome the challenge.