Music

These 16 rappers have bigger vocabularies than Shakespeare

by Mark Teo

You’ve might heard recently that Wu-Tang Clan had a bigger vocabulary than Shakespeare. And while that’s true—and it’s mighty impressive, considering the Bard was known for employing a massive variety of words—Rza and crew aren’t the only vocab-loving wordsmiths in the game. In a recent study by data scientist Matt Daniels, he discovered loads of rappers who could match Shakespeare’s verbosity—and three who could match Moby Dick author Herman Melville’s.

Here’s how Daniels’ study worked. Knowing that Shakespeare used roughly 28,000 different words across his works, word nerds extrapolated that the Bard likely knew 100,000 words in total. But this isn’t directly comparable to rap—many of the genre’s most prominent MCs haven’t put 100,000 words to tape. So, Daniels used a smaller sample size: He used a 35,000-word sample, which roughly covers three to five studio albums.

Cobbling together a 35,000-word sample—he snagged the first 5,000 words from each of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, As You Like It, Winter’s Tale, and Troilus and Cressid—Daniels was able to analyze the word variety from Shakespeare and from rappers. The results are staggering: With his sampling, many rappers actually used more words than Shakespeare, who used roughly 5,200 unique words in the 35,000-word sample.. So, who in rap has the biggest vocabulary—even bigger than Shakespeare? Check the results above—and for more analysis, check Undercurrent.