If you caught my posts on pop lyrics during the last week, namely, "Brand-New Year," "Just Another Music Monday," "'I'ma' in American Pop Music," and "Songs Celebrating Coffee," you may have noticed that I expanded my Billboard year-end Top Ten lyric corpus to include 2015, since Billboard recently published its Hot 100 of the year.* Thanks in large part to the support of my good friend Clayton Darwin at Illocution, this post takes a first look at some of the language used in the most popular songs of the past year.

Without further ado, the top ten words in the 2015 collection are:**

In a previous post, I mentioned how especially important (and frequent) personal pronouns are in pop music, as evidenced by such words typically occupying the highest ranks in studies of lyrics, while in studies of English prose, the is typically the highest-ranking word, as it is in the Brown Corpus. So, that you, me, and I are ranked one, two, and three, respectively, and my number ten is not surprising. Nor is it that the, and, it, and to cracked the top ten, given their frequency in English in general.

The appearance of the content word watch is, however, noteworthy, particularly in light of top-ten wordlists from the collection as a whole and from some randomly selected years. In terms of the set of lyrics as a whole (1951-2015), for instance, no content words are found in the top ten list of words; rather, the entire list is populated by function words, that is, personal pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and the like. And the same can be said for the years 2012-2014. In some other years, one or two content words slip into the wordlists, but these form a relatively small set of words. For instance, love appears at number two in 1957 and at number three in 1997; baby appears at number nine in 1967; want appears at number eight in both 1987 and 1997; and know appears at number nine in 2007. That a very specific word such as watch would make a dent in this kind of list is special indeed. Granted, that it only appears in three out of the ten songs in the 2015 collection points to its use (some might say "overuse") in a small number of songs (2 times in "Trap Door," 18 times in "Uptown Funk," and 77 times in "Watch Me), rather than to a growing trend among lyricists. However, the notion of watching might be particularly relevant as we as a nation become more and more obsessed with watching our reality shows, music videos, and news on televisions, computers, phones, and anything else we can lay our hands on.  Regardless of the reason, the raw numbers (as posted above) point to watch being a strong contender for word of the year in American pop music (if there were such a thing) for 2015.

As for doh, much as some of my readers might like to think that Homer Simpson's catchphrase cracked the list, it is instead merely a nonce word, if that, the likes of which appear in these lists from time to time. Furthermore, it is only attributed to a single song in the collection ("Uptown Funk").

*Thus, the collection now includes 650 songs.

**The computational tools that have been developed for this project treat words like I and I'm as distinct, unlike some other tools, such as AntConc, which collapses them and counts them together. However, an analysis using AntConc also showed you outperforming I, as well as the, although the rankings of me and I are reversed by that analysis. No lemmatization of any kind was used for this analysis.