Ever wondered which of your favorite hip-hop artists were the most scholarly? Who’s rhymes drop the most knowledge? Well, that’s what programmer Matt Daniels set out to discover. 

Here’s the description from his website: 

Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.

I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.

In his results, Daniels found that Aesop Rock used the most unique words (7,392) in his first 35,000 lyrics. The Wu-Tang Clan appear several times throughout the chart, both as a collective, and through the solo work of its members. GZA ranks in at #2, RZA at #6, Ghostface Killah at #9, and Raekwon and Method Man fall in the early 20s.

Hyphy slang master E-40 found his way to #14, with Outkast right behind him at #15. Meanwhile, some of the bigger names, including Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, 2Pac, and Lil Wayne, didn’t appear until the late 60s-early 70s in the ranking. 

Of course, this only takes the first 35,000 lyrics into account. Some newer artists who aren’t quite that prolific are yet to be featured on the graph, such as Kendrick Lamar. The ranking isn’t perfect, but it certainly is an interesting perspective towards hip hop music.

David Melamed (@DMelamz)