Hi shamat,

Dear Monks, I am a newbie in Pearl,..

Let me start by saying, if you are still new to Perl is not late to start good habit like use warnings and strict in your script.
Secondly, make your script readable use perltidy

The first entry in the list always refers to the correct spelling. I would like to find the mistakes in the entries 1-3, checking against the reference word. I would like to obtain an output like this:

One way to go is to compare each of the string with the first entry, letter by letter.
I will give a head up below.

use warnings;
use strict;

my @words = qw(believe beleive beeliv pelief);

spelling_check( $words[0], $_ ) for @words[ 1 .. $#words ];

sub spelling_check {
    no warnings 'uninitialized';
    my @wrds;
    push @wrds, [ split //, $_ ] for @_;

    my ( $right, $wrong ) = q{} x 2;

    for ( 0 .. $#{ $wrds[0] } ) {
        if ( $wrds[0]->[$_] ne $wrds[1]->[$_] ) {
            $right .= defined( $wrds[1]->[$_] ) ? $wrds[1]->[$_] : qw'
+-';
            $wrong .= defined( $wrds[0]->[$_] ) ? $wrds[0]->[$_] : qw'
+-';
        }
    }
    print join( ' ~ ' => ( $right, $wrong ) ), $/;
}
[download]

Produces..

ei ~ ie
eli- ~ liee
pf- ~ bve
[download]

NOTE: Please, note that if either of the strings comparing per time is longer, you have "uninitialized value" thus I used no warnings 'uninitialized'
2. The printing is not as the OP wanted, but simply showed the difference in the letter of each string compared.
3. The OP is to use this as a guide.
Hope this helps