You are looking for a multiset.
Python’s closest datatype is collections.Counter:
A
Counteris adictsubclass for counting hashable objects. It is an
unordered collection where elements are stored as dictionary keys and
their counts are stored as dictionary values. Counts are allowed to be
any integer value including zero or negative counts. TheCounterclass
is similar to bags or multisets in other languages.
For an actual implementation of a multiset, use the bag class from the data-structures package on pypi. Note that this is for Python 3 only. If you need Python 2, here is a recipe for a bag written for Python 2.4.