I am looking into building an RNN where the inputs are words. As you know not every word is the same size and therefore when I am one hot encoding each letter I end up having to pad the end of most words with zero arrays. Is there a better way to do this? Does a tensor even work if the array is not consistent. Where consistent is  defined as having the same dimensions.
In other words I am currently doing the following:
number_of_words * len(longest_word) * number_of_chars
since I do not believe the following is possible
number_of_words * len(word_i) * number_of_chars