I have an ArrayList of objects where each object contains a string 'word' and a date. I need to check to see if the date has passed for a list of 500 words. The ArrayList could contain up to a million words and dates. The dates I store as integers, so the problem I have is attempting to find the word I am looking for in the ArrayList.

Is there a way to make this faster? In python I have a dict and mWords['foo'] is a simple lookup without looping through the whole 1 million items in the mWords array. Is there something like this in java?

    for (int i = 0;  i < mWords.size();  i++) {
     if ( word == mWords.get(i).word ) {
      mLastFindIndex = i;
      return mWords.get(i);
     }
    }