When I print out scores, I'll need to be able to sort by the length of the word and/or sort by the word values. When sorted by value, I need to be able to display all words in specific categories by their value. All 5 pt words are grouped together, as so on.

Thank you.

Ah. Do you ever need to look up the value of word based on the word? (Ie. do you need the mapping that your simple hash provides?) If not, I’d simply keep this in the HoA as outlined by Roy Johnson and stick values inside using push @{ $words{ $score } }, $word;

Otherwise, I’d either keep both structures updated throughout the code (which means putting the push and hash assignment in a sub), or generate one of them out of the other on the fly and demand.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Something like this perhaps?

use warnings;
use strict;

my %lookup = (
    a => 2,
    b => 4,
    c => 4,
    d => 4,
    e => 1,
    f => 5,
    g => 6,
    h => 3,
    i => 2,
    j => 7,
    k => 7,
    l => 4,
    m => 3,
    n => 3,
    o => 2,
    p => 5,
    q => 11,
    r => 5,
    s => 3,
    t => 3,
    u => 2,
    v => 4,
    w => 7,
    x => 10,
    y => 7,
    z => 9
);

my @scores;

while ( my $line = <DATA> ) {
    chomp $line;
    my @words = split /\s+/, $line;
    for my $word (@words) {
        $word =~ s/[^A-Za-z]//g;
        next unless length $word;
        my @letters = split //, $word;
        my $score;
        $score += $lookup{ lc $_ } for @letters;
        push @{ $scores[$score] }, $word;
    }
}

for my $score ( 0 .. $#scores ) {
    if ( defined @{ $scores[$score] } ) {
        my %words;
        @words{ @{ $scores[$score] } } = undef;
        print 'Scored ', $score, ":\n";
        print "    $_\n" for 
          sort { length $a <=> length $b || $a cmp $b } keys %words;
        print "\n";
    }
}

__DATA__

In short, I am creating a little word game Each character is
worth X points, so I record the word in the hash along with
the value of the entire word. That's what the numbers are in
the example (not accurate, mind you, it's just  basic sample
code).

When I print out scores, I'll need to be able to sort by the
length of the word and/or sort by the word values. When sorted
by value, I need to be able to display all words in specific
categories by their value. All 5 pt words are grouped together,
as so on.
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