Removing certain lines from array

[Dr Manhattan]

Hi all

I have a input file with some data that I have to sort trough which looks like this(this is just some short silly example)

hello 1234 5698 7458
hi 1457 7459 6214
good_day 1458
hi 1258 3658 
good_morning 4758
hi 1453

I need to remove every element where the first word(first part of array element) appears twice or more in the array, so in this example the three elements starting with 'hi...' needs to be removed, even though the entire element is not identical.

I tried this but it is not working. Any ideas or easier ways to do this?

my $length = $#array;

    my $woord1;
    my $woord2;
    
for (my $q = 0; $q <= $length; $q++)
{
    if ($array[$q] =~ /^(\w+|\_)(\s)(\d{4})/)
    {
        $woord1 = "$1";
        for (my $x = $length-1; $x == 0; $x--)
        {
            if ($array[$x] =~ /^(\w+|\_)(\s)(\d{4})/)
            {
                $woord2 = "$1";
                if ("$woord1" eq "$woord2")
                {
                    print "$woord1\t$woord2\n are the same";
                    delete $array[$x];
                }
            }
        }
    }

}

Thanks in advance for any help