![[OC] 50 Years of Hip-Hop Vocabulary: A Bar Chart Race (1975–2025)](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/qffr5hfzcm6g1-1536x683.gif "[OC] 50 Years of Hip-Hop Vocabulary: A Bar Chart Race (1975–2025)")
[Better quality: https://imgur.com/a/6n942QH ]
As part of a larger project, I analyzed millions of rap lyrics collected over the years from Genius. The eligible rap songs had to be in English, have at least 100 page views and 2 contributors (as a rough proxy to relevance). The raw results include many words such as "like", "don't" etc. that I decided to filter out. I looked at the top 200 words overall and retained about 60 relevant ones that I decided to track. Anyway, the animation shows the top 20 words of each year, with some color added for slurs, verbs, vibes etc.
There are many more analyses that could be done. I can easily generate the same bar race for other words. I also have the data for up to 4 words together. Later on, I will map the artists to their places (birth, career) and see what I get. I could also focus on subgenres. Some caveat here: the genre tags found on Genius (including the "rap") are not always accurate.
If you're interested in seeing the evolution of some other words or expressions, ask in the comments 🙂
Posted by meanmaths
8 Comments
[Better quality: [https://imgur.com/a/6n942QH](https://imgur.com/a/6n942QH) ]
As a hip hop head, I can’t say I’m surprised by the “winner” :D.
The genre is huge though. Way more nuances than can be shown in this gif. I plan to apply much more advanced analysis than raw counts but as a first stab, it’s not too bad.
Why does the count go down in 2025?
Excuse me but why did you decimalise the sub-division of a year?
As it started I was like, “Most used words in hip-hop? But where’s… never mind, there it is.”
I was like “I hear it constantly where’s b- ah”
Hip hop vocabulary seems like a contradiction.
You can almost see the exact year gangster rap took off.
I wonder what happened in 2010 to cause such an expansion? Did the definition of hip-hop get broader, or did it really get that much more popular? Was this Drake blowing up, followed by countless wannabe Drakes?
*Most* of the words are gentle pastel colors except for one, it seems.