Take a look at itertools.groupby(). Note your list must be sorted first (more expensive than your method OP).
>>> from itertools import groupby
>>> l = ["This", "is", "a", "sentence", "of", "seven", "words"]
>>> print [list(g[1]) for g in groupby(sorted(l, key=len), len)]
[['a'], ['is', 'of'], ['This'], ['seven', 'words'], ['sentence']]
or if you want a dictionary ->
>>> {k:list(g) for k, g in groupby(sorted(l, key=len), len)}
{8: ['sentence'], 1: ['a'], 2: ['is', 'of'], 4: ['This'], 5: ['seven', 'words']}
