The Black Eyed Peas and Taylor Swift have bigger vocabularies than The Beatles, apparently

To ensure it's a fair test and semi-accurate look at the diversity in lyrics, there were a few ground rules:

Inspired by the largest vocabulary in hip hop, I wanted to do a similar analysis across a more generalised list of musicians. I stumbled across this list of best-selling music artists. The list is large enough (99 musicians and 25 genres) for the analysis to be interesting and small enough to not require complicated analysis techniques.

To prevent the analysis from being skewed purely by the number of songs released, the vocabularies are compared across the 100 densest songs (by total number of words) that they have released. Only 6 of these musicians have released less than 100 songs, so it is a good threshold. Also, 100 songs comprises 8 to 10 albums of music which would span at least 5 to 10 years of work. This should give a fair idea of the overall vocabulary of these musicians.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of rappers feature high on the list. It may come as more of a shock to learn that some of the widely regarded greats are not so hot on the whole word choice thing: The Beatles (no. 76 of 93), The Who (no. 86), Michael Jackson (no. 42), Stevie Wonder (no. 79), Elvis Presley (no. 38), Madonna (no. 24), and Rihanna (no. 49) are not even in the top 20.

Of course, this doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things. It's not the size of your vocabulary that matters - it's what you do with it.

Top Ten:

1. Eminem
2. Jay Z
3. Tupac Shakur
4. Kanye West
5. Bob Dylan
6. The Black Eyed Peas
7. Julio iglesias
8. Andrea Boccelli
9. Bz
10. Celine Dion