help make it faster please

[pkilambi at gmail.com]

I wrote this  function which does the following:
after readling lines from file.It splits and finds the  word occurences
through a hash table...for some reason this is quite slow..can some one
help me make it faster...
f = open(filename)
lines = f.readlines()
def create_words(lines):
    cnt = 0
    spl_set = '[",;<>{}_&?!():-[\.=+*\t\n\r]+'
    for content in lines:
        words=content.split()
        countDict={}
        wordlist = []
        for w in words:
            w=string.lower(w)
            if w[-1] in spl_set: w = w[:-1]
            if w != '':
                if countDict.has_key(w):
                    countDict[w]=countDict[w]+1
                else:
                    countDict[w]=1
            wordlist = countDict.keys()
            wordlist.sort()
        cnt += 1
        if countDict != {}:
            for word in wordlist: print (word+' '+
str(countDict[word])+'\n')