Since 500k+ is a big number and the spec says "They all start out with a g", I would rather use substr since there is no need for a test.

while (<>) {
    my $word = substr($_,1); # Start with the second letter
}
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As a note for the OP, while is a nicer option than Foreach Loops in this scenario since, in general, foreach constructs the entire list before incrementing over it, whereas while will just hit your file-handle once per loop -- normally, that means while has a much smaller memory footprint than foreach does for large sets. I don't recall if in the particular case of foreach(<$fh>) { there is an optimization in perl to avoid this pitfall.