Counting the occurences of items in an array

Has this wheel been invented, but simpler? I've an array of words that I'd like to know how many occurences of each there are. For instance: $fruits = array( "lemon", "orange", "banana", "apple", "orange", "banana",

   "orange"    );

And I'd like to create this: $fruit_count = array( "lemon" => 1, "orange" => 3, "banana" => 2,

   "apple" => 1    );

My current plan of action is to create $fruit_count, and check if $fruits[0] is listed in it. If not, then I'll add it with a value of 1. If it is already listed then I'll just increase it's number. Ditto for $fruits[1] and so on... Has someone cleverer than myself found a better way of doing this? This function will be used as a word count for text documents, and some of them have over 5000 words. So if there's a better way of doing this I'd love to know. Thanks. Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com/what_is/html_email.html http://lyricslist.com/lyrics/artist_albums/162/disturbed.php