The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop

[bleys]

http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

 

 

brief overview:

 

 

Matt Daniels is a designer, coder, and data scientist at Undercurrent in New York City. His past works include the Etymology of "Shorty" and Outkast, in graphs and charts. He decided to examine the vocabulary of hip hop artists, and this is what he found. – May 2014 Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.

 

 

When I first published this analysis, I excluded Aesop Rock, figuring he was too obscure. The Reddit hip hop community was in uproar, claiming Aesop would absolutely be #1. Sure enough, Aesop Rock is well-above every artist in my dataset and I was obliged to add him to the chart. In fact, his datapoint is so far to the right that he should be off the chart (I'm lazy and didn't adjust the scale).

 

 

Wu-Tang Clan at #6 is fuging impressive given that 10 members, with vastly different styles, are equally contributing lyrics. Add the fact that GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, and Method Man's solo works are also in the top 20 – notably, GZA at #2. Perhaps their countless hours of studio time together (and RZA’s mentorship) exposed each rapper’s vocabulary to one another.

 

 

 

 

 

and the least surprising:  

 

 

The south has the lowest average (4,268) ... In fact, only 4 of the 17 southern-based artists in the dataset are above average. My guess is that this is a function of crunk music's call-and-response style, resulting in more repetition of words.

 

 

 

also an honorable mention for jay-z...  he's so talented...

[Brooklyn Bully]

I like the thesaurus.

[bleys]

I like the thesaurus.

 

word.

[SZ James (banned)]

prose before hoes

[Rise of The Hive]

Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fug with...

[KushMcDieselson]

Awesome that Aesop Rock topped the list and was in fact off the charts lol.

Sent from my LG-US780 using CarolinaHuddle mobile app

[Darth Biscuit]

That's really cool... and I'd never heard Aesop Rock, he's good.

 

Surprised at some of the placing on that.  Kinda figured guys like Kanye would be higher 

[Seal (SmittyIsOurSavior)]

Very surprised by how far up Wale was. I always thought he was sorta underrated lyrically, but didn't realize he had that wide of a vocabulary.

 

Also surprised that Lupe is as low as he is. Figured he'd be above average all things considered.

[hepcat]

No surprise, DMX last.  WHAT

[Mother Grabber]

tres kewl