During the last week, I've posted on variants of "sunrise" and "sunset" that were provided by informants of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), a dialectological survey of rural communities in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. For this post, I ran the one-word responses provided by LAMR informants, including sunrise, dawn, and daybreak, as well as their variant forms, such as sunrises and dawned, on lyrics from songs on the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). The results are illustrated in the figure below:

Fig. 1: Variants of "sunrise" and "sunset" in the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, forms of dawn appear most often, in terms of both # of songs and total # of instances. Following are twilight, sunset, and sunrise. Variants such as daybreak and sundown were not found in this exercise, although this would probably not be the case for larger collections of songs.

As for the songs that included each of the terms, they were as follows: Dawn appears in "Vaya con Dios" (1953); "Sunshine of your Love" (1968); "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" (1979); "Hands to Heaven" (1988); "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" (1988); "Baby Got Back" (1992); and "Dreamlover" (1993); and dawning in "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine in" (1969). Twilight appears in "My Prayer" (1956) and "Kiss Me" (1999). Sunset appears in "Candle in the Wind 1997" (1998) and as a street name in "Surfin' USA" (1963). Sunrise appears in "The Candy Man" (1972).

For a few of my favorite songs outside the collection in which the investigated terms appear, see below: