William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language.
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But a new graph by data scientist Matt Daniels shows that some of today's most popular hip-hop artists can go word for word with the playwright and poet.
On his website, Daniels points out how Shakespeare used 28,829 words throughout his canon, which suggests "he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever."
Daniels graphed the vocabularies of artists like Kanye West, Drake, and LL Cool J to see where they ranked in relation to Shakespeare. To keep the graph fair to both new and old artists, Daniels used only the first 35,000 lyrics of the artists.
He used only the first 5,000 words for seven of Shakespeare's works — including "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Othello" — and included "Moby Dick" for reference (he used the first 35,000 words of the novel).
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Here are some takeaways from the graph:
- Obscure artist Aesop Rock came in at No. 1 with 2,000 more words than Shakespeare.
- Jay Z, Puff Daddy, and Ludacris all fall somewhere in the middle of the graph with a vocabulary of 4,300 to 5,000 words.
- Some artists, like The Notorious B.I.G., didn't have enough material to be included on the list.
- The members of the Wu-Tang Clan take up six spots on the list with GZA coming in at No. 2.
- DMX came in last, at No. 85, with just 3,214 words used.
If you wanted to find out more or play around with Daniels' interactive graph, you can do so here.
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