Thanks, ikegami. Your comments made the code much more readable. I don't fully understand what the matching is doing though; it does not appear to be splitting the line on delimiters, and I am unclear on the fuction of the parens.
I made the repairs as you suggest; my new code is still lacking something
C:\scripts>wordcount.pl alice.txt
distinct words: 0
frequency of most common word:
common word:
use strict;

my $maxcount;
my $find;
my $file;
my %hash;
my $count;

while(<>){
  my @list = shift =~ /([a-xA-Z'\-]+)/g;
  foreach my $word (@list) {
    $count =++$hash{lc $word};
      if ($count > $maxcount) {
        $maxcount = $count;
      }
    }
}

my $numwords= keys %hash;
print "distinct words: $numwords\n";
print "frequency of most common word: $maxcount\n";
print "common word: $find";

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In reply to Re^2: using hash to find frequency count by jjohhn
in thread using hash to find frequency count by jjohhn

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