Count occurances of hashable objects (eg: words)

Signatures:

class collections.Counter([iterable or mapping])

Examples:

from collections import Counter
words = "if there was there was but if there was not there was not".split()
counts = Counter(words)

print(counts)
# Counter({'was': 4, 'there': 4, 'not': 2, 'if': 2, 'but': 1})

print(counts.most_common(2))
# [('was', 4), ('there', 4)]

References:

1. Python Built-in - collections.Counter
2. Python Interview Tips - Count Hashable Objects