A trie normally holds many words. Some characters might have multiple characters following it . For example, "ant", "add", "amy" share the same parent node 'a'. The node 'a' has children of 'n', 'd' and 'm'. So a trie is a n-ary tree. In the trie node, there is an attribute children, which holds the references to the nodes following it. The children can be  stored in a data structure such as array, linked list or hashmap.