my $total_terms = $total_families + scalar (keys %people);
[download]

scalar (keys %hash) is actually the total number of different keys in a hash (exept you have multikeyed hashes, e.g. with BerkeleyDB), since there are no duplicate keys in a hash. And you use all terms of your data as keys to one or another hash.

You could also introduce a hash only for the purpose of storing each word found in the datafile:

while(<DATA>) {
    $seen{$1}++ while /(\w+)/g;
}
print scalar(keys %seen);
[download]

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}