I'm creating an anagram program and I'm almost done. Currently, I'm adding every word found by my anagram code into a group of listboxex. There's a listbox for 2-letter words, another listbox for 3-letter words, etc. My problem is that I'm getting duplicate words when there are "blanks". A blank can be any letter and that's what causes the duplicates.

I want to totally avoid adding duplicate words to the listboxes because it slows down the program when the list gets long. The word gets added, the list gets resorted, the scrollbars shrink etc.

Is there a command to check if a listbox already contains a word without looping through the whole list?

If I put all the unique words into an array before putting them in the listbox, is there a single command to copy an array of strings to a listbox or do I have to loop through the array and add each item one at a time?

Should I use a collection rather than an array? Does that contain a quick way to see if a word is already found?

Any other ideas on this?