Counting each letter's frequency in a string

Question

This is a question from pyschools.

I did get it right, but I'm guessing that there would be a simpler method. Is this the simplest way to do this?

def countLetters(word):

    letterdict={}

    for letter in word:

        letterdict[letter] = 0

    for letter in word:

        letterdict[letter] += 1

    return letterdict

This should look something like this:

>>> countLetters('google')

{'e': 1, 'g': 2, 'l': 1, 'o': 2}

Answer 1

Here is another optimized way to do it:

>>> import collections

>>> print collections.Counter("google")

Counter({'o': 2, 'g': 2, 'e': 1, 'l': 1})

Hope it helps!