what is the most efficient way of counting occurrences in pandas?

I have a large (about 12M rows) DataFrame df with say:

df.columns = ['word','documents','frequency']

So the following ran in a timely fashion:

word_grouping = df[['word','frequency']].groupby('word')
MaxFrequency_perWord = word_grouping[['frequency']].max().reset_index()
MaxFrequency_perWord.columns = ['word','MaxFrequency']

However, this is taking an unexpectedly long time to run:

Occurrences_of_Words = word_grouping[['word']].count().reset_index()

What am I doing wrong here? Is there a better way to count occurrences in a large DataFrame?

df.word.describe()

ran pretty well, so I really did not expect this Occurrences_of_Words DataFrame to take very long to build.

P.S.: If the answer is obvious and you feel the need to penalize me for asking this question, please include the answer as well.

4 Answers
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