No. 37· behind-the-music
522 Different Words in Ten English Lyric Sheets
The English lyric sheets of dear(you); vol.1 hold 2,554 words, but only 522 of them are different. 244 appear exactly once, and the most repeated words are the plainest ones.
A song for tired people does not need many words. But how few is "few"? We took the English lyric sheets (Version A) of the ten songs on dear(you); vol.1 and counted every word, then counted how many of them are different. This post is that count and nothing more: no reading of what the lines mean.
The scope and method first. We read the English lyric section of the ten song design documents, which were written on 2026-07-04 when the songs were commissioned, so what is sung may differ. We skipped section markers, whispered lines and the closing signature, lowercased everything and counted whole words, keeping an apostrophe inside a word, so "it's" and "it" are two different words. The ten songs add up to 2,554 words; the same total appears if you add up the per-song word counts in our earlier you, I and we post. The music is made with AI (Suno); the lyrics are drafted by AI and reviewed by a person.
2,554 words, 522 different ones
Of the 2,554 words, 522 are different. That is about one new word for every five words sung (522 of 2,554 is 20.4%). And 244 of the 522 appear exactly once in the whole album, which is 46.7% of the vocabulary. So nearly half of the different words are one-time guests, while the rest keep coming back.
The words that come back
| Rank | Word | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | the | 115 |
| 2 | a | 107 |
| 3 | you | 96 |
| 4 | to | 66 |
| 6 | little | 57 |
| 7 | for | 46 |
| 8 | okay | 38 |
| 9 | that | 37 |
| 10 | too | 36 |
Fifth place belongs to "today", which we already count by song and section in The Word "Today" in Ten Songs, so we leave its number there. A few notes on reading the table. "you" here means the exact word, 96 times; the 137 in the earlier pronoun post counts the whole you-family (your, you're and so on). "okay" at 38 agrees with Okay, Counted Across Ten Songs.
Two things stand out. The top three are "the", "a" and "you", ordinary small words. And the first word with its own mood in the list is "little", used 57 times, more often than "okay". It follows the same habit as the album's titles: "Let's Smile a Little Tomorrow." is one of them.
What the count cannot say
A small vocabulary is not the same as a simple song. Repetition is part of how a chorus works, and the design documents repeat on purpose. We also did not count the Korean versions, whose words cannot be compared one to one with these. And all of this rests on the design documents, not on the recordings.
Still, the numbers give us one concrete picture: the album speaks to you in a few hundred words, half of which it says only once. Next time, we look at the shortest lines of those words: lines made of a single word.