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Word Break at Microsoft — Interview Guide

How to approach Word Break in a Microsoft interview: the optimal approach, what Microsoft interviewers look for, and company-specific tips.

Updated 2026-09MediumDynamic Programming

The problem at Microsoft

Given a string and a dictionary of words, determine whether the string can be segmented into a space-separated sequence of dictionary words.

Microsoft uses this problem to assess growth mindset, collaborative, product-minded. Expect Microsoft-specific follow-ups that tie the solution back to production reasoning and the company's engineering bar.

Key concepts

dp[i] = true if s[0:i] can be segmented.
Transition: dp[i] is true if some j < i has dp[j] true and s[j:i] is in the dictionary.
A trie over the dictionary speeds up the substring lookup for large dictionaries.

Approach

def word_break(s, word_dict):
    words = set(word_dict)
    dp = [False] * (len(s) + 1)
    dp[0] = True
    for i in range(1, len(s) + 1):
        for j in range(i):
            if dp[j] and s[j:i] in words:
                dp[i] = True
                break
    return dp[-1]

Complexity

Metric	Value
Time	O(n²) with set lookup
Space	O(n)

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