New study uncovers the largest vocabularies in rap

For his latest study, New York data scientist Matt Daniels examined the vocabulary of 85 famous hip hop artists to find out who is the ultimate wordsmith.

He took each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics, which averaged out around 3 - 5 albums and EPs, looking at the most unique words. For comparison, the work of Shakespeare and Moby Dick author Herman Melville were used as benchmarks with the same approach - 35,000 words across seven of Shakespeare's plays, and the first 35,000 of Moby Dick. Each word was counted once, so pimp, pimps, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words. To avoid issues with apostrophes (e.g., pimpin’ vs. pimpin), they were removed from the dataset.

The resulting data was broken down into East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, Southern and WU-TANG, who have three MCs in the top ten. The clear winner was New York rapper Aesop Rock who can boast 7,392 unique words in his repertoire, more than two times as many as DMX, who clocks in at 3,214 words. Rock also easily outweighed Shakespeare who came in at 5,170, as well as Moby Dick at 6,022 words. Others rank in at: 4506 - Jay-Z, 3,982 - Kanye West, 3974 - Snoop Dogg and 3970 - 2Pac.

See the complete study here.