= The Flint Synonym Table =

This page describes the format of the Synonym table in the FlintBackend.
This table is used to implement the synonym feature.

== Key Format ==

The key is just the term.

== Tag Format ==

The tag contains a sorted list of synonyms for the term.  These are encoded as:

{{{
char(synonym.size() ^ MAGIC_XOR_VALUE) +
synonym
}}}

MAGIC_XOR_VALUE is 96.  We XOR the length values with this so that they are more
likely to coincide with lower-case ASCII letters, which are likely to be common
in the words.  This means that zlib should do a better job of compressing these
tag values.

The tag may be stored compressed by zlib, which gives a
decent amount of extra compression.  Very small tags (less than the minimum size
of compressed output) are stored uncompressed.