American rapper Eminem and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan are in the top 5 artists for the size of their vocabulary, according to a recent study.
The study, conducted by Varun Jewalikar and Nishant Verma for the lyrics website Musixmatch, examined the top-selling 99 artists from 25 different music genres.
"The aim is to compare the vocabulary size of these musicians. Some of them have released a lot more songs than the others because of the sheer longevity of their career and how prolific they are," the study said.
"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."
Eminem came first with 8,818 uncommon words and hip hop artist Jay Z came in a close second with 6,899, followed by rapper Tupac Shakur with 6,569 rare words used. Hip hop star Kanye West came in with 5,069, while Bob Dylan came in fifth with 4,883 unique words used.
Considering the density of words in a rap song, it's not surprising that rappers took the top spots. However, Dylan's incredible ability for creative song writing and high descriptive lyrics made him the clear winner among more traditional musicians. For example, Kenny G only used approximately 809 unique words in his musical career.