I see a couple of these on codereview but I was hoping my way hasn't yet been encountered: def is_palindrome_permutation(strng): cache = set() for char in strng.lower(): if not char.isalpha(): continue if char in cache: cache.remove(char) else: cache.add(char) return len(cache) <= 1 Instead of maintaining any counts of characters to check for oddness or evenness, simply add and remove characters from a set. A character repeated an even number of times will be removed from the set; a character repeated an odd number of times will remain in the set. If the final set has a length less than or equal to one, it is a permutation of a palindrome.