What this will do is create a variable, $regexpans with a value of /^(big|huge|large)\b.

This is not a regexp, it is a string. However, would you be going to use this as a regexp somehow (in a eval statement probably, I don't know), the regexp would do the following:

• Match any of the following
  • big
  • huge
  • large
• ... but only if both of the following conditions are true
  • it is at the beginning of the string
  • it is followed by a word-boundary, be this a tab, a space, a newline, a end-of-string or anything else that is part of the definition of \b

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