A salient feature of Dylan's lyrics is the frequent use the a-verb construction, a remnant of a thousand year-long evolution of the language. The 'a' is the weakened form of the preposition on (in). All together there are 109 different constructions, used 254 times in all. The most common is not the one found in this title, but another that is found in the titles of two different Dylan songs: "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Ain't A-Gonna Grieve". It is used 53 times to "a-changin's" five times.

I've just completed making a list of all the characters in Dylan's lyrics, and then realized that I'm not even close to complete. Another one of those never ending projects. Well, at least you can see where I'm at in the project. The URL is:

http://homepage.mac.com/littlerabbit/DylanCharacters/Characters2.html

(You may need to copy and paste...simply clicking returns an error for some reason.)

Dylan listeners will know that Like a Rolling Stone, a long song in comparison to the commonly heard music, is not even in the top of really long Dylan songs. It actually comes in at 56. The top ten are as follows (and yes, I realize that Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie is not actually a song so I'll include an extra; Last Thoughts was, however, performed once):

Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie             617             1838             33.6

Not all songs are like Like a Rolling Stone, chosen by Rolling Stone magazine as the greatest rock and roll song of all time (not in the least biased by the naming, of course), and some more simple numbers prove this once again. Like a Rolling Stone contains 409 total and 187 unique words, a long song, perhaps, but consistent with Dylan's oeuvre. In comparison with the total RS500 (in which Dylan holds 14 places), Dylan's songs are on the average longer and use a greater vocabulary:

Many of the words in Dylan's lyrics are numbers. Within the lyrics we find 24 digit numbers, most of them from one song: I Shall Be Free No. 10. The digits are:

3
12th
14
15
16
17
18
19
26
27
28
29
42nd
'59
69
70
'71
90
99
100
101
102
1,000
1812

Numbers in song titles is even more frequent. We find 31 titles that include a number:

10,000 Men
2 x 2
Alberta #1
Alberta #2
As I Went Out One Morning
Billy 1
Billy 4
Billy 7
Bob Dylan's 115th Dream
Days of '49
Fourth Time Around
From A Buick 6
Highway 51
Highway 61 Revisited
I Shall Be Free No. 10

Bob Dylan's lyrics show an absolutely sweet use of the English language not found in many of the popular songs of other singers and groups. Even simple totals start to show this difference. In comparison to the RS500 total word count of 112,595, Dylan's 402 songs use a total of 113,831 words. Dylan's lexis is also higher: 7,925 to 6,577.

Mothers and fathers are frequent members in popular lyrics, and Dylan's mother, Beatty, has even joined her famous son on stage once. Here is the frequency list for the mothers and fathers in the RS500's and Bob Dylan's lyrics:

                RS500           BD
ma                 2           17
mama           58          53
momma          8           17

The personal pronoun is the second most commonly used word in Dylan's lyrics (mainly contributed by one song), and accounts for 4,441 of the 110,951 words in his entire oeuvre, or about 4%.