Which Rappers Have Bigger Vocabularies Than Shakespeare?
No, that's not a euphemism. One nerd's stats project found out.
“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,” states designer, coder and data scientist, Matt Daniels. Meanwhile, our own era’s best wordsmiths continue to get unfairly ignored: if you thought the linguistic ability of rappers was lacking, you thought wrong.
Indisputable proof has surfaced that rappers — or at least a few of them (sorry Kanye) — sport vocabularies even larger than the likes of Shakespeare and Moby Dick author Herman Melville. Developed by Daniels, ‘The Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop‘ puts the vocab game of Eminem, Jay Z and Outkast up against the literary heavyweights, and there are some surprising results. The Beastie Boys, The Roots, and the fittingly-named hip-hop trio CunninLynguists were just a few of the names that came out on top of Shakespeare.
When Daniels first published the data analysis, he didn’t include backpack cult figure Aesop Rock, figuring “he was too obscure.” But Reddit instantly went into overdrive, with many claiming he would “absolutely be #1”. They were proven right: the data showed that he’s used 7,392 unique words in comparison to Shakespeare’s 5,170. “His datapoint is so far to the right that he should be off the chart (I’m lazy and didn’t adjust the scale),” Daniels added.
Daniels used token analysis in his methodology, taking the first 35,000 lyrics of each artist (or “3-5 studio albums and EPs”) to compare the number of unique words used by 85 hip-hop artists. He took the same approach to the works of Shakespeare and Melville to use them “as a benchmark.”
This is perfect, directionally interesting, and also a good lesson in linguistics and clean data. Hip hop vocabulary: http://t.co/dEex8UqkHj
— Millie Tran (@millie) May 5, 2014
Possibly to no one’s surprise, the following artists scored well towards the end of the pack:
Drake: “Okay, now you’re talkin’ my language, now you’re talkin’ my language (x4).”
50 Cent: “It’s your birthday, we gon’ party like it’s yo birthday, we gon’ sip Bacardi like it’s yo birthday.”
Kanye West: “I don’t know if you got a man or not, if you made plans or not, if God put me in your plans or not.”
With only 3,892 ‘unique words’, it’s no wonder he’s #SadKanye.