I have found some answers to this question before, but they seem to be obsolete for the current Python versions (or at least they don\'t work for me).
I want to chec
The code you posted using any() is correct and should work unless you've redefined it somewhere.
That said, there is a simple and fast solution to be had by using the substring search on a single combined string:
>>> wordlist = ['yellow','orange','red']
>>> combined = '\t'.join(wordlist)
>>> 'or' in combined
True
>>> 'der' in combined
False
This should work much faster than the approach using any. The join character can be any character that doesn't occur in one of the words in the wordlist.