awk is a programming language.
We don't have the time to learn it
but here are some snippets that are useful.

awk program (command line) to count occurences of consecutively appearing word in one column.
This could be in a pipeline after sorting one-word lines.

  awk '{if($1!=p) {print p,c; c=1; p=$1} else c++} END{print p,c}'

Example of using it to count each word of a file:
  tr -dc 'a-zA-Z \n' <alice | tr A-Z a-z | tr -s ' ' '\n' | sort |
 awk '{if($1!=p) {print p,c; c=1; p=$1} else c++} END{print p,c}' | sort -rn -k2





awk program (command line) to sum [first] column of input file:

  awk '{s+=$1} END{print s}'

Example of using it to sum the second column of the japan.txt file:
  cut -c10-11 japan.txt | awk '{s+=$1} END{print s}'



awk program (command line) to print line number and number of fields for each line:
 awk '{print NR, NF}' myfile



swap fields 1 and 2:
 awk '{temp = $1; $1 = $2; $2 = temp; print $0}' myfile



find the longest line:
  awk '{if (length > max) {
   max = length
   line = $0
   }}
   END {print line}'   myfile



frequency of words in file:
 awk '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
      count[$i]++}    
      END {for (word in count) 
         print word, "  ", count[word]}'  myfile