So I have a pandas dataframe with rows of tokenized strings in a column named story. I also have a list of words in a list called selected\_words. I am trying to count the instances of any of the selected\_words in each of the rows in the column story. 

The code I used before that had worked is 

`CCwordsCount=df4.story.str.count('|'.join(selected_words))`

This is now giving me NaN values for every row. 

Below is the first few rows of the column story in df4. The dataframe contains a little over 400 rows of NYTimes Articles. 

```
0      [it, was, a, curious, choice, for, the, good, ...
1      [when, he, was, a, yale, law, school, student,...
2      [video, bitcoin, has, real, world, investors, ...
3      [bitcoin, s, wild, ride, may, not, have, been,...
4      [amid, the, incense, cheap, art, and, herbal, ...
5      [san, francisco, eight, years, ago, ernie, all...

```

This is the list of selected\_words

```
selected_words = ['accept', 'believe', 'trust', 'accepted', 'accepts', 'trusts', 'believes', \
                  'acceptance', 'trusted', 'trusting', 'accepting', 'believes', 'believing', 'believed',\
                 'normal', 'normalize', ' normalized', 'routine', 'belief', 'faith', 'confidence', 'adoption', \
                  'adopt', 'adopted', 'embrace', 'approve', 'approval', 'approved', 'approves']

```

[Link to my df4 .csv file](https://pitt.box.com/s/s37b5ztq47mkebqyjwf40m4tyllewwg8)