Good point, though technically a hashtable can only test for existence and can't find the lower bound. Also, a hashtable is likely to require more memory.
Btw, if you need ordering for ranges, CHM minimal perfect hashes keep the words sorted in the array. So you can easily use it for ranges. But I haven't yet tested if CHM is faster than this optimized B-Tree. CHM is usually pretty slow, more recommended for >100.000 entries.
