Efficiently calculate word frequency in a string

Question

I am parsing a long string of text and calculating the number of times each word occurs in Python. I have a function that works but I am looking for advice on whether there

Answer 1

>>>> test = """abc def-ghi jkl abc
abc"""
>>> from collections import Counter
>>> words = Counter()
>>> words.update(test.split()) # Update counter with words
>>> words.most_common()        # Print list with most common to least common
[('abc', 3), ('jkl', 1), ('def-ghi', 1)]