>Thats an array of 25 elements each (a max of) 7 characters long or 175 alphanumeric characters totals.

From what I know, this is correct, though the max will always be allocated - it's just that internally the individual strings may be shorter, but they'll still take 7 characters. I don't know of any version of Cobol that had any sort of dynamic allocation (or anything dynamic, except the famous "set the GoTo command at label Blabla to point to SomewhereElse", which was a masterpiece in the "how to create unreadable code" category).