Python: Count the occurrences of each word in a given sentence

Last update on June 12 2025 12:43:20 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

Count word occurrences in a sentence.

Write a Python program to count the occurrences of each word in a given sentence.

Sample Solution:

Python Code:

# Define a function named word_count that takes one argument, 'str'.
def word_count(str):
    # Create an empty dictionary named 'counts' to store word frequencies.
    counts = dict()
    
    # Split the input string 'str' into a list of words using spaces as separators and store it in the 'words' list.
    words = str.split()

    # Iterate through each word in the 'words' list.
    for word in words:
        # Check if the word is already in the 'counts' dictionary.
        if word in counts:
            # If the word is already in the dictionary, increment its frequency by 1.
            counts[word] += 1
        else:
            # If the word is not in the dictionary, add it to the dictionary with a frequency of 1.
            counts[word] = 1

    # Return the 'counts' dictionary, which contains word frequencies.
    return counts

# Call the word_count function with an input sentence and print the results.
print( word_count('the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'))

Sample Output:

{'the': 2, 'jumps': 1, 'brown': 1, 'lazy': 1, 'fox': 1, 'over': 1, 'quick': 1, 'dog.': 1} 

Flowchart:

For more Practice: Solve these Related Problems:

• Write a Python program to count the frequency of each word in a sentence and return a dictionary of word counts.
• Write a Python program to split a sentence into words and then use a loop to build a frequency table.
• Write a Python program to implement word counting using collections.Counter on the split sentence.
• Write a Python program to count word occurrences while ignoring case and punctuation.

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