[StavrosK]

The mistake arises from the different semantics of findall versus what I initially wanted to do. I initially tried "^(dict|here)+$", which should return all the subwords, but doesn't (it only returns the last one).

I'm missing something, clearly, but my initial idea was a state machine that contained all the words (sorted by length, perhaps, but that's not necessary if we don't care about the solution with the "most words") and linked back to itself. It's essentially the same as the backtracking example, from a cursory glance.

Of course, findall is a dumb version that only finds disjoint substrings.

EDIT: It turns out that the group count in regexps is fixed, so it's not possible to return all matches of a single group, even if it's repeated. All my solution above does is show you whether there's a match or not, but not what it is (unless it's the single word).