How does this perform? 
use strict;
use warnings;

my %h;

while (<DATA>)
{
    $h{$_}++ for map { lc } grep { /^[a-zA-Z]+$/ } split /\W+/;
}

for (sort keys %h)
{
    printf "%10s %05d\n", $_, $h{$_};
}
__DATA__
This line contains garbag3, and words!
This line does not.

[download]
Note: You will need to add your special characters to the character class uses in the grep-block, and alter my script to read from STDIN.

Update:

Output: 
       and 00001
  contains 00001
      does 00001
      line 00002
       not 00001
      this 00002
     words 00001

[download]
Update:

Running this on a 1.5 MB file containing the _DATA_-section repeatedly takes <1s on my system. (1.4 GHz AMD, Perl 5.8, Win XP)


holli, /regexed monk/

In reply to Re: How much can this text processing be optimized? by holli
in thread How much can this text processing be optimized? by YAFZ

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