Matt Daniels, who is a designer, coder, and data scientist at Undercurrent in New York City recently published an article looking at the vocabulary of hip hop artists. In a surprising turn of events Insane Clown Posse were included in this article.

ICP was ranked ahead of Tupac, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and more. You can check out a description of the research and find a link to view the full article below.

From Experiments.undercurrent.com:

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 Dick).
I used a research methodology called token analysis to determine each artist’s vocabulary. Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, 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 shit), featured vocalists, and repetitive choruses.

It’s still directionally interesting. Of the 85 artists in the data set.

To check out the full list and break down click the link below.

The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop @ Experiments.undercurrent.com

Contributors:

• Statutory Ray

Websites:

• The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop