Hip hop vocabulary compared between artists

May 5, 2014  |  Statistics

hip hop vocab

Matt Daniels compared rappers' vocabularies to find out who knows the most words.



As two points of reference, Daniels also counted the number of unique words in the first 5,000 used words from seven of Shakespeare's works and the number of uniques from the first 35,000 words of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

I'm not sure how much stock I would put into these literary comparisons though, because this is purely a keyword count. So "pimps", "pimp", "pimping", and "pimpin" count as four words in a vocabulary and I have a hunch that variants of a single word is more common in rap lyrics than in Shakespeare and Melville. Again, I'm guessing here.

