Which Rapper Has The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop (an interesting study)

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.

35,000 words covers 3-5 studio albums and EPs. I included mixtapes if the artist was just short of the 35,000 words. Quite a few rappers don’t have enough official material to be included (e.g., Biggie, Kendrick Lamar). As a benchmark, I included data points for Shakespeare and Herman Melville, using the same approach (35,000 words across several plays for Shakespeare, first 35,000 of Moby ? ).

I used a research methodology called token analysis to determine each artist’s vocabulary. Each word is counted once, so pimps, ? , pimping, and pimpin are four unique words. To avoid issues with apostrophes (e.g., pimpin’ vs. pimpin), they’re removed from the dataset. It still isn’t perfect. Hip hop is full of slang that is hard to transcribe (e.g., shorty vs. shawty), compound words (e.g., king ? ), featured vocalists, and repetitive choruses.

It’s still directionally interesting. Of the 85 artists in the dataset, let’s take a look at who is on top.




#1

Aesop Rock

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).



#2, #6, #7, #9, #20, and #23

wu-tang clan aint nothin ta ? wit

Wu-Tang Clan at #5 is ? 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.

Let’s take a deeper look at Wu-Tang five studio albums to better understand each member’s contribution. Here's a breakdown of the number and percent of words used by each member.



To understand each rapper's vocabulary (# of unique words) in Wu-Tang's first five albums, I chose a 3,500 word threshold so that each person was on an equal footing. That way, we could include GZA, but unfortunately had to exclude Ol' ? Bastard, Cappadonna, and Masta Killa, who have too few verses across Wu-Tang's corpus.



U-? and GZA clearly bolster the group’s average. Raekwon and Method Man’s contributions have a lower average compared to other members, but recognize that their data points would exceed most artists in hip hop.