title: extract dictionary from Counter object
body: <p>I want to count the number of times a word occur in a list of sting.</p>
  
  <pre><code>['this is a red ball','this is another red ball']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I wrote the following code</p>
  
  <pre><code>counts = Counter()
  for sentence in lines:
      counts.update(word.strip('.,?!"\'').lower() for word in sentence.split())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It gives me a result in the following format</p>
  
  <pre><code>Counter({'': 6, 'red': 2, 'this': 2, ....})
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I only get the dictionary?</p>