MATCH on partial strings

I have a series of lines, each one identified by a keyword (or phrase) that is the first part of the string on that line. The keywords are not necessarily of the same length though.

I'd like to hold the keywords in a list and identify each line according to which keyword the leftmost characters of the line match. Ideally, something like the MATCH function would do this, but it only matches strings of a fixed length.

For example, let's say I have a line like:

TEXT created by Blah-de-blah on 27/05/2008 containing blah-de-blah-de-blah

My list of keywords might be:
ACCESS
BASIC
CSV
DATABASE
JAVASCRIPT
PROJECT
RICH TEXT
SPREADSHEET
TEXT
WORD

At the moment I am able to do a MATCH using the first three characters of the line with the first three characters of each list element. That works, but I'd like to build something more reliable and arbitrary for the day when list elements cannot be uniquely identified by the first three characters.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Ed. Thanks for that. I see what you've done; taken the first word by finding the first space. Mine's a bit more complicated than that, unfortunately, though you wouldn't know it from the example I gave, but you've given me some ideas so thanks again.