Finding the most popular words in a list

Question

I have a list of words:

words = [\'all\', \'awesome\', \'all\', \'yeah\', \'bye\', \'all\', \'yeah\']

And I want to get a list of tuples:

Answer 1

The defaultdict collection is what you are looking for:

from collections import defaultdict

D = defaultdict(int)
for word in words:
    D[word] += 1

That gives you a dict where keys are words and values are frequencies. To get to your (frequency, word) tuples:

tuples = [(freq, word) for word,freq in D.iteritems()]

If using Python 2.7+/3.1+, you can do the first step with a builtin Counter class:

from collections import Counter
D = Counter(words)