In which case you will also have to define "numbers" :) integers?, floats? e-notation? Roman? Only ASCII-digits, or also other Unicode numerals?

Let me assume simple integers and floats represented in ASCII (no triad-sep, radix-sep = '.', so valid numbers include 1234 and 0.23, but not DCVII, 2.34e12 or 1,234,567.00

my %count;
while (<FH>) {
    $count{lc $_}++ for grep { !m{^[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?$} } m/\w+/g;
    }
[download]

For a complete regular expression to integers and reals, I'd like to refer to Regexp::Common (see $RE{num}).

update: /me just realized that it is overly complex, as \w+ can only match integers without a triad-sep, as . is not included in \w, reducing the loop-line to

$count{lc $_}++ for grep { !m{^[0-9]+$} } m/^\w+$/g;
[download]

Thanks H.Merijn That's perfect. I will go and read up on the hash function. G

... count ... but excluding numbers.

This just confuses me. Can you provide a small input list of words and a corresponding output list showing the non-numeric 'count' you desire for the given input?