Building a dictionary of counts of items in a list

Question

I have a List containing a bunch of strings that can occur more than once. I would like to take this list and build a dictionary of the list items as the key and the count

Answer 1

I would have made a specialized List, that backed by the Dictionary and the add method would test for membership and increase count if found.

sorta like:

public class CountingList
{
    Dictionary countingList = new Dictionary();

   void Add( string s )
   {
        if( countingList.ContainsKey( s ))
             countingList[ s ] ++;
        else
            countingList.Add( s, 1 );
   }
}