Perhaps a small, complete example (with embedded comments) will help:

% cat AnagramWordList
foo
bar
baz
% cat 690557.pl
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $wordfile = 'AnagramWordList';
my %hashlist;

### It is a good practice to use the 3-argument form of "open"
open my $wordhandle, '<', $wordfile or die "Unable to open WordList: $
+!";
while (<$wordhandle>) {
    chomp;              ### Remove newline character
    $hashlist{$_}++;    ### Add word to hash
}
close $wordhandle;      ### It is a good practice to close the file AS
+AP

### Print out contents of hash
while (my ($key, $value) = each %hashlist) {
    print "key=$key, value=$value\n";
}
% ./690557.pl
key=bar, value=1
key=baz, value=1
key=foo, value=1
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