Count number of times value appears in particular column in MySQL

Question

This has probably been asked before, but I'm unable to make my way through the myriad of search results.

Given a non-normalized MySQL table, what is the most optimized query to count the number of times each distinct value of column x was used?

e.g. Given a table containing

mike mary mike 

Return results like:

mike 2 mary 1 

From the MySQL documentation, it would seem that count is an aggregate function that can be used with GROUP BY, but it's not doing what I want (it's returning the total number of rows in the GROUP BY, not the number of appearances for each row. i.e. this does not work SELECT count(email) as c FROM orders GROUP BY email

Answer 1

select email, count(*) as c FROM orders GROUP BY email 

Answer 2

SELECT column_name, COUNT(column_name) FROM table_name GROUP BY column_name