And I am guessing that I would not want to use the sorted version I have listed above for performance reasons
With a trie it doesn't matter. Any (list|of|fixed|words), no matter how long or whether sorted or not will be pre-compiled into a trie. The only thing you should do is deduplicate them. To give you some idea of the performance difference, taking the pattern at the end of your posting and doing a repeated failed match against a long string: 
my $r = qr/(?:u|uau|uauau|
....
ufududufubudufufudufubudufu)/x;
my $s = "a" x 1000000;
$s =~ $r for 1..10;

[download]

On my laptop, this takes 27s on 5.8.9 and 0.024s on 5.10.0 and later.

perl 5.10.0 was released about 8 years ago. If you're going to do lots of matching against big word lists it would pay to upgrade to something newer than 5.8.x.

Dave.

In reply to Re^3: Warning about playing with matches by dave_the_m
in thread Warning about playing with matches by ExReg

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