How to Count and Sort Words by Their Frequency in Python?

Counting and Sorting Words by Frequency

Counting the frequency of words in a given list is a common task in programming. To sort the list of unique words based on their frequencies, one can leverage Python's Counter class.

We begin by importing the Counter class from the collections module:

<code class="python">from collections import Counter</code>

Consider the following example:

<code class="python">list1=['apple','egg','apple','banana','egg','apple']</code>

To count the frequency of each word, we instantiate a Counter object with the list of words:

<code class="python">counts = Counter(list1)</code>

The resulting Counter object, counts, provides a dictionary-like interface where the keys are the unique words and the values are their frequencies:

<code class="python">print(counts)
# Counter({'apple': 3, 'egg': 2, 'banana': 1})</code>

To sort the unique words based on their frequencies, we can leverage the most_common() method of the Counter object:

<code class="python">sorted_counts = counts.most_common()</code>

The most_common() method returns a list of tuples, where each tuple consists of a word and its frequency. We can sort this list in descending order based on the frequencies:

<code class="python">sorted_counts.sort(key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)</code>

The resulting sorted_counts list will now contain the unique words sorted in decreasing order of their frequencies.

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