Kanye West and Eminem Use a Wider Vocabulary Than Bob Dylan, Study Says

Kanye West's last album, 2013's Yeezus, was stark and minimal, drawing heavily from Chicago drill and house. Its detractors (some of whom had been fans of West's earlier, more conventional work) were unhappy with the vocals, feeling that they weren't dense or verbose enough. Well, they should know their complaints fly in the face of cold, hard facts. A research group called Musixmatch took it upon themselves to track the vocabulary of the world's wordiest artists; while only four rappers made the list of the 99 artists with the largest vocabularies, those rappers occupy the top four spots. (The Black Eyed Peas come in at #6, though many of the songs used for the analysis are from after their full transition to the pop side of the dial.) Taken into account were three important criteria: the number of distinct words used across an artist's 100 densest songs; the total number of words used in that same list of songs; the so-called New Word Interval, or the average number of words between each new, distinct word. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eminem came in at the top spot, with 8,818 distinct words used in his 100 densest songs, followed by Jay Z at 6,899, 2Pac at 6,596 and Kanye West at 5,069. It would stand to reason that the simple fact of a rap song's word count being higher accounts for the quartet sliding in ahead of Bob Dylan. It's important to note that the pool from which artists were drawn was a list of the highest-selling musicians of all time. Aesop Rock fans can sleep easy.