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Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

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Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#21

Post by ch4s3 »

riggins wrote: post #6

I find it hilarious that DMX is dead last. I've now got empirical evidence of what I always thought. I think DMX rhymes words with themselves more than any rapper I've ever heard.

I said out loud before clicking the link that DMX would likely be dead last.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#22

Post by philtar »

unfunco wrote: post #14

This is fascinating. I'm only a recent listener of hip-hop (primarily because of Earl Sweatshirt and Odd Future) and I'm in awe of the vernacular. And similarly, as a boredom exercise a few weeks ago I did some lexical analysis of the song Timber (the monstrosity was being constantly played on the radio at the time) and here's what I came out with: "83.1% of the words in the lyrics are five letters or less, 58.9% are…

You must be using big words in case someone does the analysis on HN comments.

Definitions: Vernacular: ?? Lexical analysis (in this case): ratio of unique words to non unique words Lexical density: What persent of the words is unique?

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#24

Post by Aardwolf »

> Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words

Why does that suggest he knew over 100k words? Maybe it means he knew 28,829 and used all of them? Would he really know over 70,000 words he never used in his works? What would those 70,000 words be? Probably very obscure ones. How can you know that many obscure ones?

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#27

Post by tokipin »

Just a note, those artists don't necessarily use all their vocabulary. Eminem for example clearly holds back on his vocabulary. Rap is as much an art as anything can be so there are all sorts of factors. Be careful what you might want to draw here other than curiousity.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#28

Post by mbillie1 »

Aardwolf wrote: post #24

> Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words Why does that suggest he knew over 100k words? Maybe it means he knew 28,829 and used all of them? Would he really know over 70,000 words he never used in his works? What would those 70,000 words be? Probably very obscure ones. How can you know that many obscure ones?

Vocabulary has for a while been considered in terms of 'receptive' and 'productive' capacity, with the assumption being that ones 'receptive' vocabulary can be larger, since it is easier to hear/read/understand a word than it is to use it correctly in reading/writing (this is not necessarily the popular opinion anymore [http://www.readingconnect.net/web/FILES/english-language-and...] but may provide the context for the claim about Shakespeare). The notion is that you are able to understand more words than you commonly use in your speech/writing, which is on some level intuitive, although of course it is an empirical question.

Re: Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

#29

Post by redacted »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #23

Incredibly, a list about rapper vocabulary is missing anyone associated with nerdcore. I'm interested to see where the likes of MC Frontalot, Wordburglar, YTCracker, etc. rank on that scale...

The author addresses the "Why is $RAPPER not on the list?" on the larger reddit threads:

http://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/24neym/rappers_...

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/24nw9p/rapp...

My gut feeling is that the nerdcore guys would be decidedly middle-of-the-road, but I'd love to see the result!

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