Unfortunately your approach will raise a KeyError the first time you encounter a specific word since that word is not in the dictionary. Thus the get method, which has a default if the key is not in the dictionary will work. From: Gabriele Battaglia Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 12:23 PM To: pythonvis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [pythonvis] Re: Part 2: How to split line into words and count them Il giorno 22/mag/2014, alle ore 18:03, Richard Dinger <rrdinger@xxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto: wordMap[word] = wordMap[word] + 1 GB: or, better wordMap[word] += 1 — Namasté! Sent from my iMac27. (Libero)