I've used the following technique successfully for this kind of situation. It compiles the regex only once, so it can be reused efficiently in a loop:

my @array = qw( ciccio paperino palla gigio pluto );
my $TestReStr = join("|", map { "(${_})" } @array);
my $TestRe = qr/$TestReStr/;
my $test = 'pluto';
print "It matched!\n" if $test =~ $TestRe ;
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