Wow - lots to chew on there. Thanks.

A couple of responses/questions/etc:

Always use strict especially when you are new.

Check out my response to that a few posts up...I'm working on getting to the place where I will use strict, but I'm not quite there yet.

I replaced your for/push loop with a grep which only passes words that are three characters or longer

That started out to capture all words of 4 or more letterrs, but words like dog's and cat's were skipped. I added the second part, [a-zA-Z]{3,}', to cature those...it seems to work as far as I can tell.

I re-wrote this as a tr/// expression -snip-

Ooh - I like that a lot better...thanks!