Who has the largest vocabulary in Hip-Hop?

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Matt Daniels is a designer, coder, and data scientist at Undercurrent in New York City. His past works include the Etymology of "Shorty" and Outkast, in graphs and charts. He decided 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, 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.

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# of Unique words used within artist’s first 35,000 lyrics

The graph is an interactive one you so you need to click on the link to see who fits where:
LINK

Wu-Tang had #2 GZA, #6 RZA, #7 Whole Group, #9 Ghostface Killah, #20 Raekwon, #23 Method Man

MF DOOM right above Shakespeare



*Disclaimer:All lyrics are provided by Rap Genius, but are only current to 2012. My lack of recent data prevented me from using quite a few current artists.