LeetCode 819, Easy. Topics: Array, Hash Table, String, Counting. View on LeetCode.
Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 20 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:
Problem
Given a string paragraph and a string array of the banned words banned, return the most frequent word that is not banned. It is guaranteed there is at least one word that is not banned, and that the answer is unique.
The words in paragraph are case-insensitive and the answer should be returned in lowercase.
Note that words can not contain punctuation symbols.
Examples
Constraints
- 1 <= paragraph.length <= 1000
- paragraph consists of English letters, space ’ ’, or one of the symbols: ”!?’,;.”.
- 0 <= banned.length <= 100
- 1 <= banned[i].length <= 10
- banned[i] consists of only lowercase English letters.
Solution
Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:
Complexity
Last modified on September 7, 2026