The answer, not surprisingly, is "the".
The match was the key, as ikegami said.
I would greatly appreciate a hint about how it is producing an appropriate list of words to count. This improved approach does not appear to parse a string on delimiters, but to alter the value of $_.

In reply to Re^4: using hash to find frequency count by jjohhn
in thread using hash to find frequency count by jjohhn

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