Matt Daniels is a designer, coder, and data scientist living in New York City. His past works include the Etymology of "Shorty" and Outkast, in graphs and charts. He teamed up with Red Bull Music Academy 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, heuses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.
Matt 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.
Be sure to check out the full report:
