Here's a bit of code that is a considerable bottleneck after doing some measuring:

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
//  Construct dictionary hash set from dictionary file
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
void constructDictionary(unordered_set<string> &dict)
{
    ifstream wordListFile;
    wordListFile.open("dictionary.txt");

    string word;
    while( wordListFile >> word )
    {
        if( !word.empty() )
        {
            dict.insert(word);
        }
    }

    wordListFile.close();
}

I'm reading in ~200,000 words and this takes about 240 ms on my machine. Is the use of ifstream here efficient? Can I do better? I'm reading about mmap() implementations but I'm not understanding them 100%. The input file is simply text strings with *nix line terminations.