The following part of the script should look if there two words seperated by ";", split them,

And then

@foo = split (/; /, $edict{$count}{english});

Note the extra space in the regex - it doesn't do what you described it should. If there's no space, then split will not match.

Anyway, your example uses quite some nested data structures of which we know nothing. We also don't know what the string looks like that you want to split. If you want more or better help, give us some data (and a simpler piece of code that does the same thing). See also How (Not) To Ask A Question.