Are you familiar with Perl hashes? They are very helpful for questions like this. With them, a string indexes a scalar chunk of data. That can be applied to a wordcount by just incrementing the value keyed by each word you see. After that, sort can be told to pick out the keys with the highest values, and grep to filter out short ones (or else don't add them to the hash in the first place).

Your split doesn't do exactly what you want, it will split "want, it" into three, with a zero length 'word' from between the comma and the space. You may want to replace the space in your character class with \s, add more punctuation, and allow it to repeat with the + quantifier.

Check out the length function.

What is unexpected about the behavior of apostrophes?

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