Good day! I'm trying to write a script that takes a list of words and checks to see if each word exists within another word in the list. The specifics are as follows:

1) The word list contains 640,000 entries

2) A word cannot match itself (ie: "a" cannot match "a")

3) A word cannot match itself as a plural even if it makes a different word (ie: "a" cannot match "as")

4) A word cannot match itself with an apostrophe s "'s" (ie: "a" cannot match "a's" but "a" can match "aa's")

Coming from a mainframe background I am trying to use loops but the performance is horrible. From what i've read, hashing seems to be the way to go but I think I am still implementing this as a loop and getting very poor performance (100 records in 20 seconds).

Here is what i've tried so far:

use warnings;
use strict;

#define constants
my $datapath="F:\\wordsinwords\\";
my $wordfile= $datapath."wordlist.txt";

#define variables
my $outrecs=0;
my $word;

open LOG, ">".$datapath."wordsinwords_LOG.txt" or die $!;
select LOG;
$|=1;

#read the wordlist file into an array
open (WORDFILE, $wordfile);
chomp (@words = (<WORDFILE>));
close (WORDFILE);

#main
#coerce the array into a hash
%hash = map { $_ => 1 } @words; 

#search for matches 
#I have no idea how to put a single
#regex together that could meet all of the criteria so
#I was going to run this multiple times to target specific
#criteria until I found all permutations.
foreach $word (keys %hash) {
    $outrecs++ if /.+$searchword/ ~~ %hash; 
}

#===============================================
# This was an attempt at using an array
# but it was also very slow
#===============================================
#foreach $word (@words) {
#    $outrecs++ if ($found) = grep (/.+?$word/, @words);
#}

#close files & write out completion log
print LOG "Created output file with: ".$outrecs." records.\n";
close LOG;
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