>Suppose you have a lookup table with one character field. Selections from this table are entered in a related field in some other table. If the strings in the lookup table were really long, most of us would make a keyfield for the lookup table and store that key in the related table, instead of the long string. But many would not bother if the strings were only a few characters. For the sake of speed, where do you draw the line? Six characters? Twenty? Also, does the number of records in the lookup table make a difference?

From normalized data standpoint you should have at least 2 fields in lookup table: ID (primary key) and Description.