First of all, I really liked that your logic doesn't need to compare lengths: as soon as a match is found, it must be one of the shortest lengths, nice! And when the end is unreachable, the method returns 0, an impossible answer (since a valid length must be >= 1), so that's good too.
A couple of things can be improved.
ChoosingChoose the right interfaces
Your method should work with Set<String> dict, and should not limit users to HashSet<String> dict.
ChoosingChoose the right classes
A Deque is a collection that supports element insertion and removal at both ends. That's more than what you need. A Stack would have been enough for your purpose.
SimplifyingSimplify the inner forfor loops
The inner for loops are a bit wasteful and can be simplified. You are basically iterating over all possible 1-letter differences and check if in the dictionary. Instead, you could iterate elements of the dictionary and see if they have 1 letter difference. For example like this:
for (String item : dict.toArray(new String[dict.size()])) {
if (isSingleCharDiff(analyzing, item)) {
dict.remove(item);
lengthCount.add(curCount + 1);
wordSearch.add(item);
}
}
Discrepancy with the specs
The problem description says:
dict = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]
With this exact input your method returns 0 because it will never reach end. The fix is simple enough, just add it to the dictionary somewhere near the start:
dict.add(end);
A wasted operation
Before the while loop, you do this:
wordSearch.add(start);
lengthCount.add(1);
but then inside the loop you immediately pop them. You could rework the code to eliminate that wasted operation:
String analyzing = start;
int curCount = 1;
while (true) {
if (analyzing.equals(end)) {
return curCount;
}
for (String item : dict.toArray(new String[dict.size()])) {
if (isSingleCharDiff(analyzing, item)) {
dict.remove(item);
lengthCount.add(curCount + 1);
wordSearch.add(item);
}
}
if (wordSearch.isEmpty()) {
break;
}
analyzing = wordSearch.pop();
curCount = lengthCount.pop();
}