python - Best way to turn word list into frequency dict

Question

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?

In other words:

['a', 'b', 'b', 'a', 'b', 'c']
--> 
{'a': 2, 'b': 3, 'c': 1}

(I've had to do something like the above so many times, is there anything in the standard lib that does it for you?)

EDIT:

Jacob Gabrielson points out there is something coming in the standard lib for the 2.7/3.1 branch

Answer 1

I find that the easiest to understand (while might not be the most efficient) way is to do:

{i:words.count(i) for i in set(words)}