Soraya Nadia McDonald, The Washington Post

May 5, 2014

If you ever wondered how the vocabularies of the world’s elite rappers stand up to literary heavyweights such as William Shakespeare and Herman Melville, your wait is over. There’s an interactive graph for that.

Matt Daniels, a self-described designer, coder and data scientist, has given hip-hop the Five Thirty Eight treatment, quantifying wordsmithing with his unique methodology:

He used the first 5,000 words from seven Shakespeare works: “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Othello,” “Macbeth,” “As You Like It,” “Winter’s Tale” and “Troilus and Cressida.” To compare rappers to Herman Melville, he analyzed the first 35,000 words from “Moby Dick,” offering this explanation:

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. […continued]

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