The endless parsing of the Beatles has begun anew with this week’s release of the Rock Band game and the
remastered back catalog.
A curious writer at the Guardian ran the lyrics of the Beatles’ 300-plus songs through a word count program to see what words they used the most. After the pronouns (“You” – 2,262 times, “I” – 1,736 times) and definite articles (“the” – 1,355 times), a few of the workhorse words were –
“Love” – 613
“Be” – 497
“Know” – 436
“Oh” – 343
Down the list a bit is -
“Girl” – 170
“Hey” – 164
“Please” – 92
“Dance” – 81
It’s when you get down below 30 that the list gets strangely comical. “Bungalow” – 28. How is that possible? Well, that chorus in “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” does repeat quite a few times. And how about “Monkey” – 21? The word appears a few times in “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey” but what other songs use monkey? I can’t think of any at the moment.
The least used words? There’s a long list tied at 1, including “daisies,” “coconut” and “bullet-headed.”
Read the entire list here:
