Sparking comments about Kanye West giving Bob Dylan the "thesaurus blues," a new survey of the vocabulary of top-selling musical artists puts Eminem at the top of a chart dominated by hip hop.
The survey, conducted by Varun Jewalikar and Nishant Verma for MusixMatch, was inspired by Matt Daniel's analysis of rappers' vocabulary, which shows sixteen rap artists using vocabularies that outstrip Shakespeare's, with three surpassing the vocabulary diversity of Moby Dick.
The new study looks at not just rappers, but all top-selling musical artists. Can they compare word-wise to Shakespeare, Melville, or even MF DOOM? This isn't the first vocabulary-in-music study to spin off of Daniel's — last summer, we wrote about an analysis by the Liverpool Echo of the vocabulary range of British Pop — and those others, like this new one, conclude that some of our favorite artists write pretty vocabulary-poor songs.
Or, as Jewalikar and Verma explained, "This...should not be interpreted as saying that one musician is better than the other. It is just another insight into the work of these amazing artists.…Some tear your heart with just a few words, while others paint an intricate picture with a thousand words.'”
Our concern, as always, is not with how many words these artists are using, but as vocabulary learners, "What words are they using?" and "Do we know them?" With that in mind, we've created a list of some of the most challenging words culled from the lyrics of vocabulary-heavy hip hop artists.
Open the list, go to the practice tab and start answering questions on these words. By the end of your practice session, we promise you'll know them all. Or click "Learn this List" to add all ten of these words to your overall Vocabulary.com program and master them forever.