Make everything lowercase This way “Hello” and “hello” are treated the same.

Remove punctuation Get rid of commas, periods, and exclamation marks so they don’t stick to words.

Split the text into words Break the paragraph into a list/array of words based on spaces.

Count each word’s occurrences

• Create a “word counter” object or dictionary.

• Go through each word:

  • If it already exists in the counter, increase its count by 1.
  • Otherwise, start it at 1.

Sort by count Take all the words with their counts and sort them so the most common ones are first.

Pick the top three words Once it’s sorted, grab the first three and return them (just the words, not the counts).