Jesse,
1) I bet you've heard at least once that using StringBuffer (or the JDK 1.5 StringBuilder) is better than using
String and the "+" operator. This program is absolutely one of those times. If you made tokenList into a StringBuffer (or StringBuilder) and used separate "append()" calls instead of each "+" operation, you'd have a noticeable speedup.
2) Another probably large performance improvement could be gotten with buffered I/O. Replace the Scanner allocation with
new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader("Websters_1913_Dictionary.txt")));
... and
you should notice a
large speedup.
3) Your signature is
hella confusing -- I thought it was part of your question, originally, which really confused me, as I couldn't see where any of that output was supposed to come from. I'd change it if I were you!