The Largest Vocabulary
among
Black Novels

—Howard Rambsy II

Inspired by Matt Daniels’s “The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop,” this developing project takes a look at unique words in novels by Black writers. We used the first 30,000 words from 60 different novels by 25 Black writers.

The number of unique words constitutes one of many elements of a novel. Moving forward, we plan to add additional novels and provide analyses of the findings. For now, peruse the items below to get a sense of the number of unique words deployed dozens of novels.