Research reveals the most ‘metal’ word in the world

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Blogger digs deep into English language to reveal the most ‘metal’ word in existence

Metal fans

A date-science blogger by the name of Degenerate State has researched the most ‘metal’ word in the English language.

He initially published his findings in late April, but only now has his project come to light – and it throws up some surprising results.

To get the data, he mined website Dark Lyrics, which features a database of 222,623 songs from 7364 rock and metal bands spread over 22,314 albums. He then cross-referenced his findings with the Brown Corpus – a collection of documents published in 1961 covering a range of different genres.

By combining statistics to show the frequency of words used from both sources, Degenerate State came up with a comprehensive list of the “metalness” of each word.

And he found that while Five Finger Death Punch have the highest number of swear words in their lyrics, the word ‘burn’ is the most ‘metal’ word used in the English language.

Other words featuring in the top 20 were ‘cries’, ‘veins’, ‘eternity’, ‘scream’ and ‘demon’. The least ‘metal’ word he stumbled across was ‘particularly’.

For more, visit Degenerate State’s blog, while the top 20 words can be found below.

The top 20 most ‘metal’ words

  1. Burn
  2. Cries
  3. Veins
  4. Eternity
  5. Breathe
  6. Beast
  7. Gonna
  8. Demons
  9. Ashes
  10. Soul
  11. Sorrow
  12. Sword
  13. Goodbye
  14. Dreams
  15. Gods
  16. Pray
  17. Reign
  18. Tear
  19. Flames
  20. Scream
Scott Munro
Scott Munro
Louder e-commerce editor

Scott has spent 35 years in newspapers, magazines and online as an editor, production editor, sub-editor, designer, writer and reviewer. Scott joined our news desk in the summer of 2014 before moving into e-commerce in 2020. Scott keeps Louder’s buyer’s guides up to date, writes about the best deals for music fans, keeps on top of the latest tech releases and reviews headphones, speakers, earplugs and more for Louder. Over the last 10 years, Scott has written more than 11,000 articles across Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and Prog. He's previously written for publications including IGN, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record and The Herald, covering everything from daily news and weekly features, to tech reviews, video games, travel and whisky. Scott's favourite bands are Fields Of The Nephilim, The Cure, New Model Army, All About Eve, The Mission, Cocteau Twins, Drab Majesty, The Tragically Hip, Marillion and Rush.