With bash 4, the closest thing you can do is use associative arrays.

declare -A map
for name in hello world my name is perseus; do
  map["$name"]=1
done

tgt=henry
if [[ ${map["$tgt"]} ]] ; then
  : found
fi

With bash 4, the closest thing you can do is use associative arrays.

declare -A map
for name in hello world my name is perseus; do
  map["$name"]=1
done

...which does the exact same thing as:

declare -A map=( [hello]=1 [my]=1 [name]=1 [is]=1 [perseus]=1 )

...followed by:

tgt=henry
if [[ ${map["$tgt"]} ]] ; then
  : found
fi