Meaning of list[-1] in Python

One of the neat features of Python lists is that you can index from the end of the list. You can do this by passing a negative number to []. It essentially treats len(array) as the 0th index. So, if you wanted the last element in array, you would call array[-1].

All your return c.most_common()[-1] statement does is call c.most_common and return the last value in the resulting list, which would give you the least common item in that list. Essentially, this line is equivalent to:

temp = c.most_common()
return temp[len(temp) - 1]