The word “heart” was in 15% of America’s hit songs in 1973 and 44% in 1991. Every big word in pop does this: “love” peaked in 1989, “money” in 2019.

Name: “love” (charted by MacroSnaps)
Creator: Billboard Year-End Hot 100 (walkerkq corpus and Wikipedia); lyrics via LRCLIB; author's counts
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

“love”44%(2025)“heart”22%(2025)“money”6%(2025)

Share of each year’s Billboard Year-End Hot 100 whose lyrics contain the word, three-year averages. Heart includes hearts. One lyrics source throughout, found for 5,525 of the 6,100 year-end entries from 1965 to 2025.

Why this is happening

The heart is the clearest wave. It bottoms in 1973 amid funk and disco, triples to 44% of hits by 1991 on the power ballad, then falls back to about a fifth of the chart, where it has sat for twenty years.
Love turns out to be a wave too, just a shallower one. It peaked at 69% of hits in 1989 and is now at 44%, the lowest in the sixty years, which is a decline the first fifty years of data alone did not show.
Money ran the other way, from under 5% of hits through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to a peak of 22% in 2019. It has since fallen back, though recent years are volatile enough that the size of that drop is uncertain.

The take

Pop has no permanent vocabulary. The words that feel eternal are just the ones that happened to peak while you were listening. Anyone reading this chart in 1991 would have called the heart the fixed centre of popular music. It was already at the top and about to halve.

Source: Billboard Year-End Hot 100 (walkerkq corpus and Wikipedia); lyrics via LRCLIB; author's counts

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<a href="https://macrosnaps.app/c/pop-heart-peak">
  <img src="https://macrosnaps.app/charts/pop-heart-peak.png" alt="Share of each year’s Billboard Year-End Hot 100 whose lyrics contain the word, three-year averages. Heart includes hearts. One lyrics source throughout, found for 5,525 of the 6,100 year-end entries from 1965 to 2025." width="640" style="max-width:100%;height:auto">
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  Chart: <a href="https://macrosnaps.app/c/pop-heart-peak">MacroSnaps</a>,
  <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>. Source: Billboard Year-End Hot 100 (walkerkq corpus and Wikipedia); lyrics via LRCLIB; author's counts.
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Cite it

Cites MacroSnaps for the chart. For the numbers themselves, cite the source below.

MacroSnaps (2026). "The word “heart” was in 15% of America’s hit songs in 1973 and 44% in 1991. Every big word in pop does this: “love” peaked in 1989, “money” in 2019." Edition No. 82, 1 October 2026. https://macrosnaps.app/c/pop-heart-peak

Permanent link: https://macrosnaps.app/c/pop-heart-peak

The underlying data

MacroSnaps drew this chart. The numbers in it are published by Billboard Year-End Hot 100 (walkerkq corpus and Wikipedia); lyrics via LRCLIB; author's counts. Their terms, not ours, govern the underlying data.