“Reduce” function for Series
With itertools.chain() on the values This could be faster: from itertools import chain categories = list(chain.from_iterable(categories.values)) Performance from functools import reduce from itertools import chain categories = pd.Series([[‘a’, ‘b’], [‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’]] * 1000) %timeit list(chain.from_iterable(categories.values)) 1000 loops, best of 3: 231 µs per loop %timeit list(chain(*categories.values.flat)) 1000 loops, best of 3: 237 µs per … Read more