It's that time of year again when we can look at some of the words that made an impact in the popular songs of the past year. Last year, watch was the big winner. This year, interestingly enough, the big winner is another W word. And that word is......WORK!

In the list below of words extracted from the lyrics of songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (2016), work is the only non-stop (or content, as opposed to function or grammatical) word to occupy the list of the ten most frequent words.

Fig. 1: List of most frequent words in Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (2016) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Although the word only appears in one song, it does so a total of 79 times. But to show that the word's popularity in the collection is no fluke, it also is the only content word to appear in the list of most frequent words in Billboard's year-end Top Thirty charts (2016), as shown in the figure below:

Fig. 2: List of most frequent words in Billboard's year-end Top Thirty charts (2016) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

In the Top Thirty, the word work occurs 180 times in 5 songs.

After work, the highest-ranking content words in the Top Ten collection are dance, panda, sorry, and feeling; in the Top Thirty collection, the words are life, love, dance, and baby. The latter list raises another interesting observation about the 2016 collections: the relatively low frequency of love and baby, when compared to other specific years and to lyric collections in general, where these two words are typically the highest-ranking content words.

Without further ado, the 2016 "work songs" (by decreasing frequency of the word work in the song):

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