Jscript regex match period or end of string

Just trying to get my regex to accept an end of string OR a period as a correct match.

So, say

ball
- or -
ball.

should work.

Thought it would be as easy as
[a-z]{1,8}[\.|$]

but that doesn't appear to be working. Any thoughts? Thanks.

1. $ isn't a character like . or \w or \d. It's an assertion. It means "at this point the string has to end". Putting it inside a character set doesn't make sense, thus when you do so it reverts to the literal character (ie, "a dollar sign").
2. Using character set for a single character is quite unnecessary.