Ah ok, your implementation appears to do pretty much the same thing as mine, disabling common suffix handling when there are multiple suffixes. (I strived _hard_ with little luck to overcome that problem). Just in case you havent thought of it already do you collapse things like /fo(?:o|a)l/ to /fo[oa]l/?

I have to admit ive never used a module for this stuff. Ive always handrolled. :-) I have a specialized Inline::C Trie matcher for digits that is thousands of times faster than the regex engine (when match times alone are relevent).