How many words do we speak a day?
A 2007 study in Science recorded 396 university students with a device that captured 30 seconds of audio every 12.5 minutes for several days, then transcribed and counted. The average came out at 16,215 words a day for women and 15,669 for men — a difference far too small to be statistically meaningful, which demolished the widely repeated claim that women speak 20,000 words a day and men 7,000. That claim had no source; it appeared in a bestselling book and was never traced to any study. The real finding is that individual variation is enormous: the quietest participant spoke about 500 words a day, the most talkative about 47,000.
How the figure is arrived at
The Electronically Activated Recorder samples ambient audio at intervals rather than recording continuously, which is what makes the study ethically and practically possible. Word counts from the samples are scaled to the full waking day. Sampling rather than continuous recording introduces error, but far less than asking people to estimate their own output.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 500
- High estimate
- 47,000
- Spread
- 94.0× between the bounds
Other every day counts
- How many babies are born each day? about 360,000 — roughly four every second
- How many people die each day? about 170,000 — roughly two every second
- How many Google searches are made every day? roughly 8.5 billion — about 100,000 a second
- How many emails are sent every day? about 360 billion
- How many times does your heart beat in a lifetime? about 2.5 billion
- How many cups of coffee are drunk every day? roughly 2.5 billion
- How many photos are taken every day? roughly 5 billion a day — about 2 trillion a year
- How many steps do you take in a lifetime? roughly 150 million — about 110,000 km
- How many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? 500 hours a minute — about 720,000 hours a day
- How many pizzas are sold every day? somewhere between 3 and 8 million a day in the United States
- How many breaths do you take in a lifetime? about 600 million
- How many messages are sent every day? about 100 billion on WhatsApp alone
Common questions
- How many words do we speak a day?
- about 16,000
- How is that estimated?
- The Electronically Activated Recorder samples ambient audio at intervals rather than recording continuously, which is what makes the study ethically and practically possible. Word counts from the samples are scaled to the full waking day. Sampling rather than continuous recording introduces error, but far less than asking people to estimate their own output.
Related pages
- How many babies are born each day? about 360,000 — roughly four every second
- How many people die each day? about 170,000 — roughly two every second
- How many Google searches are made every day? roughly 8.5 billion — about 100,000 a second
- How many emails are sent every day? about 360 billion
- How many times does your heart beat in a lifetime? about 2.5 billion
- How many cups of coffee are drunk every day? roughly 2.5 billion
- How many photos are taken every day? roughly 5 billion a day — about 2 trillion a year
- How many steps do you take in a lifetime? roughly 150 million — about 110,000 km
- How many people are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many countries are there in the world? Things people built
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? Living things and the natural world
- How many ants are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
Sources
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place