title: Best way to turn word list into frequency dict
body: <p>What's the best way to convert a list/tuple into a dict where the keys are the distinct values of the list and the values are the the frequencies of those distinct values?</p>
  
  <p>In other words:</p>
  
  <pre><code>['a', 'b', 'b', 'a', 'b', 'c']
  --&gt; 
  {'a': 2, 'b': 3, 'c': 1}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(I've had to do something like the above so many times, is there anything in the standard lib that does it for you?)</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>Jacob Gabrielson points out there is <a href="http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/collections.py?view=markup&amp;pathrev=68559#Counter" rel="noreferrer">something coming in the standard lib</a> for the 2.7/3.1 branch</p>