You could always step through you code with the debugger 'perl -d' to see what it's really doing.

But a first glance you don't actually clean up the word list as your comment suggests

What do you think this does?

for (my $x = 0; $x <= $#wordlist; $x++)
    {
        my $token = $wordlist[$x];
        
        if ($token =~ /(['\-\w]+)/)
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