Counter A counter returns a defaultdict(int) of the items passed to it as a parameter from collections import Counter counter_list = Counter([0, 1, 2, 3, 0]) counter_list Counter({0: 2, 1: 1, 2: 1, 3: 1}) document = "Hello this is a test and this is another test." word_count = Counter(document.split(' ')) word_count Counter({'Hello': 1, 'this': 2, 'is': 2, 'a': 1, 'test': 1, 'and': 1, 'another': 1, 'test.': 1})