Hi LanX,

Thanks for your comments, I'll think about whether I can provide a TL;DR version - my thought was that impatient users could just copy-n-paste my code :-)

IIRC there is a hard limit for the length of a regex-string

I'm not sure, I'll have to look into it, but I do know this works :-)

my $word_regex = do {
    open my $wfh, '<:utf8', '/usr/share/dict/words' or die $!;
    chomp( my @words = <$wfh> );
    close $wfh;
    my $re = join '|',
        map {quotemeta}
        sort { length $b <=> length $a or $a cmp $b }
        @words;
    qr/$re/i };
print length($word_regex), "\n";

__END__

964836
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Thanks,
-- Hauke D