What's a good hash function for English words?

Question

I have a long list of English words and I would like to hash them. What would be a good hashing function? So far my hashing function sums the ASCII values of the letters the

Answer 1

If you don't need it be cryptographically secure, I would suggest the Murmur Hash. It's extremely fast and has high diffusion. Easy to use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MurmurHash

http://code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/MurmurHash3

If you do need a cryptographically secure hash, then I suggest SHA1 via OpenSSL.

http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/sha.html