You've received excellent suggestions on how to split on whitespace to get the words out of lines.

The following is more than requested, but perhaps it will assist your scripting:

• Always begin your scripts with use strict; use warnings;
• Use lexically-scoped variables (my), including as file handles
• Use the three-argument form of open
• You can omit the parentheses when using chomp in your script (but not in all scripts)
• The second chomp isn't necessary, since you'll be splitting on whitespace
• You need to enclose your if(!exists $dict{$word}) ... within a for loop that iterates through the words in @words

Given the above, consider the following (it's been run through perltidy):

use strict;
use warnings;

my %dict;

open my $infile, '<', 'words.txt' or die "can't open file $!";

while ( my $word = <$infile> ) {
    chomp $word;
    $dict{$word} = 1;
}

close $infile;

while ( my $line = <> ) {
    my @words = split /\s+/, $line;

    for my $word (@words) {
        if ( !exists $dict{$word} ) {
            print "$word is mispelled\n";
        }
    }
}
[download]

I hope this is helpful.

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