Let me elaborate on pg's note. Not only will chomp not do what you hoped, using reverse is needlessly expensive. This is better written using two efficient s/// expressions.

for ( @phrase ) {
    s/^\s+//;
    s/\s+$//;
    print "$_\n";
}
[download]

This will not work. As others pointed out, chomp does not chomp white spaces.

Your reverse() trick will work ;-) if chomp chomps trailing white spaces.