Yeah, in particular it would be great to see how the load time compares. John found that even loading literal JSON in a JavaScript interpreter is much slower than loading a comparable length string. Presumably the latter is just a buffer copy operation.
There are a couple of things to balance. I'm building a word game myself right now, and ran into these same issues. I found that loading a string for each letter of the alphabet worked adequately. It is not clever in the least, and far from optimal, but it ended up with a reasonable size / load time / processing trade off in the browser.
