diff --git a/dhlab/text/conc_coll.py b/dhlab/text/conc_coll.py
index 5091660..e592115 100644
--- a/dhlab/text/conc_coll.py
+++ b/dhlab/text/conc_coll.py
@@ -168,7 +168,7 @@ def from_df(cls, df):
 class Counts(DhlabObj):
     """Provide counts for a corpus - shouldn't be too large"""
 
-    def __init__(self, corpus=None, words=None, cutoff=0, sparse=False):
+    def __init__(self, corpus=None, words=None, cutoff=0, sparse=True):
         """Get frequency list for Corpus
 
         :param corpus: target Corpus, defaults to None
diff --git a/dhlab/text/corpus.py b/dhlab/text/corpus.py
index 5089493..10dd319 100644
--- a/dhlab/text/corpus.py
+++ b/dhlab/text/corpus.py
@@ -234,11 +234,11 @@ def coll(
             ignore_caps=ignore_caps,
         )
 
-    def count(self, words=None, cutoff=0, sparse=False):
+    def count(self, words=None, cutoff=0, sparse=True):
         """Get word frequencies for corpus"""
         return dh.Counts(self, words, cutoff, sparse)
 
-    def freq(self, words=None, cutoff=0, sparse=False):
+    def freq(self, words=None, cutoff=0, sparse=True):
         """Get word frequencies for corpus"""
         return dh.Counts(self, words, cutoff, sparse)