With CPython this is probably the faster version, the version with list.count() has to be used only if you are sure to always have a short input list, because it's O(n^2):
str_list = ['StringA', 'StringC', 'StringB', 'StringA', 'StringC', 'StringD', 'StringA' ] str_counts = {} for s in str_list: if s in str_counts: str_counts[s] += 1 else: str_counts[s] = 1 Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list