If you're searching for an exact match you might as well use a hash: 

my $commonWords = {}; # Make commonWords a ref to an empty hash

...

while (my $line = <>)
{
  chomp($line);
  $commonWords->{$line} = 1;
}

...

if ($CkDiscardCommonwords eq 1)
{
  return(0) if exists $commonWords->{$term};
}

[download]
I suppose you extracted the code from your script and that's why you have a return outside of a function?

In reply to Re: Filtering out stop words by Eily
in thread Filtering out stop words by IB2017

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