Linked list

How it is used

Adding or removing items is fast, but finding the nth item is slow because you must walk the chain. Variants are singly and doubly linked lists. They are a favorite topic in coding interviews ('reverse a linked list') but less common in everyday application code.

Example sentences

1. In the interview they asked me to detect a cycle in a linked list.

2. We switched from an array to a linked list because we insert items in the middle all the time.

Common collocations

• singly linked list
• doubly linked list
• reverse a linked list
• traverse a linked list

Related terms

• arrayAn ordered collection of items stored one after another, where each item can be reached by its position number, called an index.
• data structureA way of organizing data in memory, such as an array, list, tree or hash map, so that certain operations are fast and simple.
• treeA data structure with a root at the top and branches of child nodes below it, used for data that has levels, such as folders, menus or a page's HTML.
• Big O notationA way of describing how the running time or memory use of an algorithm grows as the input gets bigger, for example O(1), O(n) or O(n²).

More terms: Data Structures and Algorithms

• algorithm
• iterate
• hash map
• recursion
• time complexity
• index
• sort
• stack
• queue
• binary search
• brute force
• space complexity