The biological significance of minimal absent words has been investigated in genomes of organisms from all domains of life. For instance, three minimal absent words of the human genome were found in Ebola virus genomes. There exists an O(n) -time and O(n) -space algorithm for computing all minimal absent words of a sequence of length n on a fixed-sized alphabet based on suffix arrays. A standard implementation of this algorithm, when applied to a large sequence of length n , requires more than 20 n xc2xa0bytes of RAM. Such memory requirements are a significant hurdle to the computation of minimal absent words in large datasets.