Most Frequent Word in Strings List

Last Updated : 05 Feb, 2025

We are given a list of strings we need to find the most frequent words from that particular list. For example, w = ["apple", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana", "apple"] we need to find most frequent words in list which is 'apple' in this case.

Using Counter from collections

Counter class from the collections module counts occurrences of words in list. Using Counter.most_common(1) we can retrieve most frequent word along with its count.

Python

from collections import Counter

# Define a list of words
w = ["apple", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana", "apple"]

# Use Counter to count occurrences of each word and get the most common word
f = Counter(w).most_common(1)[0][0]  
print(f)

Output

apple

Explanation:

Counter(w) creates a dictionary-like object that counts occurrences of each word, and most_common(1) returns a list with most frequent word and its count.
[0][0] extracts the most frequent word from tuple.

Using a Dictionary

We can use a dictionary to manually count word occurrences by iterating through list and updating count for each word with highest count is then identified by checking maximum value in dictionary.

Python

w = ["apple", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana", "apple"]
f = {}
for word in w:
    f[word] = f.get(word, 0) + 1  # Increment count for each word

# Find the word with the highest frequency
m = max(f, key=f.get)
print(m)

Output

apple

Explanation:

Dictionary f stores word counts using f.get(word, 0) + 1 to update occurrences for each word in list.
max(f, key=f.get) finds the word with the highest frequency by selecting key with maximum count.

Using `collections.defaultdict`

defaultdict from the collections module simplifies counting by initializing missing keys with a default value. We can use it to store word frequencies and find most frequent word using max().

Python

from collections import defaultdict

w = ["apple", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana", "apple"]

freq = defaultdict(int)
for word in w:
    freq[word] += 1

f = max(freq, key=freq.get)
print(f)

Output

apple

Explanation:

defaultdict(int) automatically initializes missing keys with a default value of 0 making it easier to count word occurrences without checking for key existence.
max(freq, key=freq.get) finds word with highest count by selecting key with maximum value.