In the vein of http://xkcd.com/353/ http://xkcd.com/353/ : >>> from collections import Counter >>> Counter("here are some words here are".split()).most

In the vein of http://xkcd.com/353/ http://xkcd.com/353/ : >>> from collections import Counter >>> Counter("here are some words here are".split()).most_common(3) [('are', 2), ('here', 2), ('words', 1)]