It doesn't seem to me that you want to be altering any of the words; you're writing a pure filter. (Right?)

So I'd probably do this:

    my @words = 
        grep { /^[a-z]/i }
        map { split }
        <FILE>;
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The map produces a list of all the "words" in the file; the grep filters out any that don't begin with a letter. If you need to remove punctuation and stuff like that (if you said you did, I missed that), then you could modify the split accordingly:         map { split /\W+/ } hth,

jdporter
...porque es dificil estar guapo y blanco.