The Vocabulary Of Popular Music Lyrics

How large is the vocabulary of popular music?

How would we measure this? Should pronouns and articles and conjunctions be eliminated or included in the count?

Either way, I figure it is maybe a couple of thousand words. I am talking about the words that are commonly used. Opaque was used by the Beatles in a song, that does not really put it in the common vocabulary of pop lyrics, but we could even go ahead and agree to include in the count unusal one-offs like this one.

How about excluding the unusual one-offs and including all pronouns, articles and conjunctions? That sounds more accurate to me?

What about it, folks? I am going to guess that the common vocabulary of pop lyrics is pretty darn small, like between 2000 and 3000 words, maybe fewer. The vocaulary of lyrics is somewhat smaller than the normal speaking vocabulary of Americans, I believe.

We all know and use plenty of words that never make it into a song. If they do make it, they make it as unusual one-offs. We all know what indignation is, but you will probably not hear it in a song anytime soon. That is true of most words in the dictionary--they make poor fodder for popular songs.

All genres like rock, country, folk and gospel are included. Even show tunes, which are generally a bit more educated can be included. I do not believe show music uses any words regularly that popular lyrics in general do not use regularly. One-offs are one-offs. We are looking for the normal working vocabulary of popular lyrics.

Wiktionary Frequency Lists consulted Television scripts, stripping out everything but the dialogue, for a sum of nearly thirty million words of dialogue. Then they assembled the most frequent words and ordered them in a list of three thousand words by frequency of occurrence.

Of these three thousand words, I felt none fell outside the purview of popular songs, though a word such as "eventually", which was among the three thousand listed, would probably find itself edited out for "someday", in the vast majority of pop songs. Eventually you'll be sorry, or is it to be Some day you'll be sorry?

I estimated that about 15% of the words on the list were first names of people. Any name with the right number of syllables could be inserted in a song, so they are not the type of vocabulary word I am interested in.

Baleful and disseminate were two words not on the list. Neither is technically outside the purview of popular songs, but they are not favored words, for I suspect many people are not sure what baleful means and disseminate could make a sung line sound awkward.

The only way to know the vocabulary of popular lyrics is to count the words in songs lyrics the way Wiktionary did in television scripts.

Just outside of the 3000--5000 words that I now guesstimate that pop lyrics may frequently use, lies a large, available vocabulary. However, many words simply do not fit comfortably in the vocal traditions of our language.

Guesstimates are useless. The only way is to count. I would not feel comfortable with fewer than about five million words of lyrics. Will someone else please do the count?

Do we need more than 3000 words in song lyric vocabulary?

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Do we need more than 3000 words in song lyric vocabulary?

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I am not sure song lyrics could tolerate a steady diet of unusual words even in small amounts. Once in a while there is the opportunity to sneak a fancy word into a song in such a way that it does not seem odd. I think that is the most that can be done.

I agree. Song lyrics should stick with simple words. Conveniently, they are also the ones I understand best.

hi A lyrics search site is great for that! add in the words to search for and youre far from gold!

It would be a massive job to compile the lyrics to a hundred thousand songs and count the different words. My guess is in the 2000-3000 range for the final tabulated result. One would have to write a program that scanned lyrics and did all the counting and elimination of duplicates.