Take a look at perlop for the list of operators. You need to use eq and ne for string comparison instead == and !=. Also, grep is a good function to be familiar when dealing with arrays.

use strict;

my @words = qw(foo bar baz biz);

for (1..2) {
    print "enter a word:"; 
    chomp(my $word = <STDIN>);
    if (grep {$word eq $_} @words) {
        print "found MATCH!!";
        last;
    }
}
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