Adults say an estimated 12,792 words per day, and the much-repeated claim that women say 20,000 words to men’s 7,000 is off by a wide margin. A 2025 registered report pooled 2,197 people aged 10 to 94 from four countries and found women averaging 13,349 words a day and men 11,950, with a clear gap only between ages 25 and 64. The least talkative person in that data spoke 62 words a day and the most talkative 124,134, so the spread between individuals dwarfs the spread between sexes. Speed is a separate question, covered in our speech rate statistics; this roundup is about volume. We aggregated data from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Science, Psychological Science, the BLS American Time Use Survey, UC Riverside, Language Log at the University of Pennsylvania, and two decades of Electronically Activated Recorder studies.
TL;DR
- Participants in 22 pooled samples spoke an estimated 12,792 words per day on average (Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025).
- Women aged 25 to 64 averaged 21,845 words per day vs 18,570 for men of the same age (University of Arizona News 2025).
- Women gossiped more than men only in neutral, information-sharing gossip, not in negative gossip (UC Riverside News 2019).
- US women spent 0.65 hours a day socializing and communicating in 2025 vs 0.52 hours for men (BLS American Time Use Survey 2025, Table 1).
- A meta-analysis of earlier studies found men slightly more talkative overall, d = -.14 (Leaper and Ayres, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2007).
- Daily word counts fell by about 300 words per year of data collection between 2005 and 2018 (University of Arizona News 2025).
- The ‘20,000 vs 7,000’ claim has relatives such as 50,000 vs 25,000 in 1990s advice books, with no word counts behind any of them (Language Log 2006).
- Americans spent 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating in 2025, down from 41 minutes in 2015 (BLS American Time Use Survey 2025).
- Time spent talking with others correlated with life satisfaction at r = .22 in a pooled replication (Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018).
- People gossiped about 52 minutes a day, roughly 14% of their conversation (UC Riverside, Social Psychological and Personality Science 2019).
- Swiss adults talked about their personal past two to three times as much as their personal future (Demiray et al., Frontiers in Psychology 2018).
1. How Many Words People Actually Say Per Day
Every number in this section comes from the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): a small pocket audio recorder that switches itself on for a few seconds at a time through the day, for example 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes. Researchers count the words a participant speaks in each snippet and scale that up to roughly 17 waking hours. Because the device samples real life instead of asking people to estimate, it sidesteps the biggest weakness of talkativeness research: people are poor judges of how much they talk.
The headline is that the original estimate of about 16,000 words a day did not hold. The 2025 pooled sample averaged an estimated 12,792 words per day, and the authors also found that later data collections produced lower counts than earlier ones. Whether that is a real decline in talking or a by-product of who was recorded and when is still open, and the authors themselves flag it as a finding to treat with caution. Most recent available data for the 2007 figures: the 2007 Science study.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average words spoken per day, all participants pooled (2025 study) | 12,792 (SD = 9,154) | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Average words per day, women vs men, all ages pooled (2025 study) | 13,349 vs 11,950 | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Participants, age range and audio snippets in the 2025 study | 2,197 people aged 10 to 94; about 630,000 recordings from 22 studies in four countries | University of Arizona News, February 3, 2025 |
| Average words per day, women vs men, 2007 study (396 university students, six samples, one in Mexico) | 16,215 (SD = 7,301) vs 15,669 | Mehl et al., Science 2007, reported in Scientific American, July 6, 2007 |
| Change in words per day for each additional year of data collection, 2005 to 2018, and the resulting shift in the typical daily average | About 300 fewer words per year; from about 16,000 to about 13,000 words per day | University of Arizona News 2025 |
| Share of the day actually recorded when the EAR samples 30 seconds every 12 minutes | About 5% | Mehl, Current Directions in Psychological Science 2017 |
Context note: the 2007 sample was made up entirely of college students, and 87% of its data came from one city, Austin, Texas. The 2025 study was designed to fix exactly that, by adding adolescents, working-age adults and people over 65.
2. The Gender Gap by Age Group
The 2025 study did not find one gender gap; it found a gap that appears in midlife and fades on either side of it. Women aged 25 to 64 spoke an estimated 3,275 more words per day than men of the same age, an effect the authors size at d = 0.32 (a small-to-moderate difference in standard units). That is the only age band where the whole credible interval (the Bayesian range of plausible values) sits outside the plus-or-minus 1,000-word zone the researchers had pre-set as ‘practically equivalent’.
Why midlife stands out is not something this kind of data can answer. Stress, which some had expected to widen the gap, had no measurable effect: the stress by gender interaction came to 11 words per day. Older research also cuts against the stereotype: a large meta-analysis of earlier studies found men slightly more talkative overall, with small differences in the style of speech rather than its amount.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Estimated overall gap, women minus men, all ages | 1,073 words per day (95% credible interval 316 to 1,824) | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Gap, women minus men, in the three inconclusive age groups: adolescents aged 10 to 17 (n = 193), emerging adults aged 18 to 24 (n = 780), older adults aged 65 and over (n = 507) | 513 words, CrI [-1,206; 2,286]; 841 words, CrI [-369; 2,028]; -788 words, CrI [-2,013; 417] (men slightly higher after 65) | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Gap, women minus men, early and middle adulthood, aged 25 to 64 (n = 698) | 3,275 words, CrI [1,492; 5,074], d = 0.32 | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Average words per day, women vs men, aged 25 to 64 | 21,845 vs 18,570 | University of Arizona News 2025 |
| Meta-analysis of talkativeness across studies: direction of the overall difference | Men more talkative, d = -.14 | Leaper and Ayres, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2007 |
| Same meta-analysis: assertive speech (men higher) vs affiliative speech (women higher) | d = .09 vs d = .12 | Leaper and Ayres, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2007 |
Context note: the overall means (13,349 vs 11,950) differ by 1,399 words, while the model-estimated gap is 1,073 words. The model adjusts for differences between the 22 samples, so the estimate, not the raw subtraction, is the figure the authors stand behind.
3. The Talkativeness Range: Individuals Differ Far More Than Sexes
If you want to predict how much someone talks, knowing their sex tells you very little. The least talkative person in the 2025 data spoke an estimated 62 words a day and the most talkative 124,134, both adult men. The 2007 study told the same story on a smaller scale: a gender difference of 546 words against an individual range of about 46,000 words.
Self-perception is another weak guide. People’s ratings of their own talkativeness correlated only modestly with their recorded word counts, and among emerging adults the gender gap in self-rated talkativeness was more than three times larger than the gap in actual words. Culture shows the same blind spot: American students rated themselves as more talkative than Mexican students but talked almost 20% less in daily conversations.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Least vs most talkative participant, 2025 study (both adult men) | 62 vs 124,134 words per day | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Least vs most talkative participant, 2007 study (both men) | 695 vs 47,016 words per day | Mehl, Current Directions in Psychological Science 2017 |
| Gender difference in the 2007 study vs range between individuals | 546 words vs about 46,000 words | Mehl, Current Directions in Psychological Science 2017 |
| Correlation between self-rated talkativeness and recorded words per day; size of the gender gap in self-ratings compared with the gap in recorded words among emerging adults | r = .22; more than 3 times larger | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| American students vs Mexican students: amount of daily conversation | Americans talked almost 20% less, despite rating themselves as more talkative | Ramirez-Esparza et al., Journal of Research in Personality 2009, reported in Mehl 2017 |
| Sample of that cross-cultural comparison | 54 University of Texas students and 46 students in Monterrey, Mexico, recorded for two days | University of Washington News, April 30, 2009 |
Outlier note: the 2025 university press release rounds the extremes to about 100 and more than 120,000 words per day; the table uses the exact values printed in the paper.
4. Where the ‘20,000 vs 7,000 Words’ Myth Came From
The famous ratio was never measured. Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain stated that women speak about 20,000 words per day and men about 7,000, nearly three times as many. Linguist Mark Liberman at the University of Pennsylvania tried to trace it and found a family of similar figures in marriage-advice and self-help books going back to the 1980s, with the numbers changing from book to book. His verdict: he could find no evidence that anyone had ever supported these assertions by actually counting words.
Real counts, where they existed, told a different story. A British National Corpus analysis (a large collection of recorded everyday British speech) put the daily totals much closer together, and a study of telephone calls found men producing slightly more words than women in mixed-sex conversations. The myth still came back in 2013, when news outlets attached it to a study of rat pups and a brain protein that did no word counts at all.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Words per day claimed in The Female Brain, women vs men | 20,000 vs 7,000 | Scientific American, July 6, 2007 |
| Gary Smalley, Connecting with Your Husband (1993 pamphlet), women vs men | 25,000 vs 12,000 words per day | Language Log, Sex-linked lexical budgets, August 6, 2006 |
| James Dobson, Love for a Lifetime (1993 edition, same quote found in a 1987 copy), women vs men | 50,000 vs 25,000 words per day | Language Log 2006 |
| Allan Pease, CNN interview 2004, women vs men | 20,000 to 24,000 vs 7,000 to 10,000 words per day | Language Log 2006 |
| British National Corpus estimate (Rayson et al. 1997), women vs men | 8,805 vs 6,073 words per day | Language Log 2006 |
| Two-party telephone conversations (5,850 calls): words produced by men vs women in mixed-sex calls | Men about 6.4% more | Language Log, An invented statistic returns, February 22, 2013 |
| News outlets listed as repeating the 20,000 vs 7,000 claim between February 20 and February 23, 2013 | 17 (our count of the outlets listed) | Language Log 2013 |
Context note: the 2013 revival was pinned on a University of Maryland study in The Journal of Neuroscience about the FOXP2 protein in rat pups and a small number of human children; the study counted no words.
5. Time Spent in Conversation
Word counts are one lens; time is another. In EAR studies, the share of recordings in which a participant is talking varies a lot by group and by study. Swiss young adults were heard speaking in 21% of their snippets, while four US samples in a pooled happiness study ranged from 32% to 47% of recordings with the participant talking to others. Those figures use different definitions (the participant speaking vs the participant being in conversation), so they are not directly comparable.
Diary-based government data adds a national trend. The American Time Use Survey counts socializing and communicating only when it is the main activity, so conversation at work or while doing something else is not included and total talking is understated. Even so, it shows social time shrinking over the decade and women spending more of it than men. How quickly people reply in those conversations is a different question, covered in our turn-taking gap statistics, and the shift from calls to messages is tracked in our voice message vs text preference statistics.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Share of EAR snippets containing the participant’s speech, Swiss young adults aged 19 to 31 (n = 33) | 21% (2,087 of 9,827 snippets) | Demiray, Mehl and Martin, Frontiers in Psychology 2018 |
| Share of valid recordings spent talking with others, range across four US samples | 32% to 47% | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
| Share of valid recordings spent alone, same four US samples | 37% to 67% | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
| Average time per day socializing and communicating as a main activity, US, 2025 vs 2015 | 35 minutes vs 41 minutes | BLS American Time Use Survey 2025 results, June 25, 2026 |
| Average hours per day socializing and communicating, men vs women, US, 2025 | 0.52 vs 0.65 | BLS American Time Use Survey 2025, Table 1 |
| Share of people socializing and communicating on an average day, men vs women, US, 2025 | 28.2% vs 32.5% | BLS American Time Use Survey 2025, Table 1 |
| Time spent gossiping per day (n = 467, aged 18 to 58, five EAR studies) | 52 minutes, about 14% of conversation | UC Riverside News, May 3, 2019 |
| Gossip about acquaintances vs about celebrities, same study | 3,292 vs 369 samples | UC Riverside News 2019 |
Context note: in the gossip study, roughly three quarters of gossip was neutral information sharing, and women out-gossiped men only in that neutral category, not in negative gossip.
6. Small Talk, Substantive Conversation and Well-Being
What people talk about may matter more than how much. In a 2010 EAR study of 79 undergraduates, the happiest students had about twice as many substantive conversations as the unhappiest (45.9% vs 21.8% of their conversations) and about one third as much small talk. In plain words, substantive conversation is talk with real content, as opposed to banal small talk.
The replication is the more important result. Pooling 486 adults, including cancer patients and their partners, meditation-trial volunteers and recently separated adults, the link between life satisfaction and time spent talking, and substantive talk, held up. The negative link with small talk did not: small talk turned out to be neutral, not harmful. A 2020 EAR study of 256 participants (3,206 observations) likewise found the quantity of social interaction robustly associated with greater well-being (Sun, Harris and Vazire, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2020). All of these are correlations, so they cannot show that deeper talk causes happiness.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Time spent alone, happiest vs unhappiest participants (79 undergraduates, 4 days) | 58.6% vs 76.8% | Mehl et al., Psychological Science 2010 |
| Time spent talking, happiest vs unhappiest participants | 39.7% vs 23.2% | Mehl et al., Psychological Science 2010 |
| Small talk as a share of conversations, happiest vs unhappiest | 10.2% vs 28.3% | Mehl et al., Psychological Science 2010 |
| Correlation of well-being with substantive conversations vs with small talk (2010) | r = .28 vs r = -.33 | Mehl et al., Psychological Science 2010 |
| Correlation of life satisfaction with time spent talking, pooled replication (N = 429 in pooled analyses) | r = .22, 95% CI [.13, .31] | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
| Correlation of life satisfaction with number of substantive conversations, pooled replication | r = .23, 95% CI [.14, .32] | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
| Correlation of life satisfaction with number of small-talk conversations, pooled replication | r = .05, 95% CI [-.04, .14] (did not replicate) | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
| Share of sound files about the personal past vs the personal future (81 Swiss adults) | 10.1% to 12.7% vs 2.7% to 5.5% | Demiray, Mehl and Martin, Frontiers in Psychology 2018 |
Context note: in the 2010 sample as a whole, 17.9% of conversations were coded as small talk and 35.5% as substantive. Most recent available data for the small talk findings: Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018.
Summary: Words Spoken Per Day (Men vs Women) by the Numbers
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average words spoken per day, 22 pooled samples | 12,792 | Tidwell et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2025 |
| Average words per day, women vs men, aged 25 to 64 | 21,845 vs 18,570 | University of Arizona News 2025 |
| Change in words per day for each additional year of data collection, 2005 to 2018 | About 300 fewer | University of Arizona News 2025 |
| Average words per day, women vs men, 2007 study (396 university students) | 16,215 vs 15,669 | Mehl et al., Science 2007, via Scientific American |
| Share of sound files about the personal past vs the personal future (81 Swiss adults) | 10.1% to 12.7% vs 2.7% to 5.5% | Demiray, Mehl and Martin, Frontiers in Psychology 2018 |
| Meta-analysis: assertive speech (men higher) vs affiliative speech (women higher) | d = .09 vs d = .12 | Leaper and Ayres, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2007 |
| Meta-analysis of talkativeness, overall difference | Men more talkative, d = -.14 | Leaper and Ayres, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2007 |
| British National Corpus estimate, women vs men | 8,805 vs 6,073 words per day | Language Log 2006 |
| US time socializing and communicating, 2025 vs 2015 | 35 vs 41 minutes per day | BLS American Time Use Survey 2025 |
| Share of US men vs women socializing and communicating on an average day, 2025 | 28.2% vs 32.5% | BLS American Time Use Survey 2025 |
| Daily gossip | 52 minutes, about 14% of conversation | UC Riverside News 2019 |
| Time talking, happiest vs unhappiest students | 39.7% vs 23.2% | Mehl et al., Psychological Science 2010 |
| Substantive conversations, happiest vs unhappiest | 45.9% vs 21.8% | Mehl et al., Psychological Science 2010 |
| Life satisfaction and substantive conversations, pooled replication | r = .23 | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
| Life satisfaction and small talk, pooled replication | r = .05 (not significant) | Milek et al., Psychological Science 2018 |
Methodology and Sources
- Tidwell, Danvers, Pfeifer et al., Are Women Really (Not) More Talkative Than Men? A Registered Report, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 128(2), 367-391, 2025: 2,197 participants, 22 samples, 631,030 EAR recordings, USA, Switzerland, Serbia and Australia; author manuscript also at CDC Stacks.
- University of Arizona News, Do women talk more than men? It might depend on their age, February 3, 2025: age-group means and the time trend.
- Scientific American, Gender Jabber: Do Women Talk More than Men?, July 6, 2007: reporting on Mehl, Vazire, Ramirez-Esparza, Slatcher and Pennebaker, Science 317(5834), 82, 2007. Most recent available data for the student sample.
- Mehl, The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), Current Directions in Psychological Science 26(2), 184-190, 2017: EAR method, 2007 range and the US vs Mexico comparison.
- University of Washington News, April 30, 2009: sample of Ramirez-Esparza, Mehl, Alvarez-Bermudez and Pennebaker, Journal of Research in Personality 2009.
- Leaper and Ayres, A meta-analytic review of gender variations in adults’ language use, Personality and Social Psychology Review 11(4), 328-363, 2007.
- Language Log (University of Pennsylvania), Mark Liberman, Sex-linked lexical budgets, August 6, 2006 and An invented statistic returns, February 22, 2013: origins of the myth, the British National Corpus estimate and the telephone-call comparison.
- BLS American Time Use Survey, 2025 results, released June 25, 2026 and Table 1.
- UC Riverside News, May 3, 2019: Robbins and Karan, Who Gossips and How in Everyday Life?, Social Psychological and Personality Science.
- Mehl, Vazire, Holleran and Clark, Eavesdropping on Happiness, Psychological Science 21(4), 539-541, 2010.
- Milek et al., Eavesdropping on Happiness Revisited, Psychological Science 29(9), 1451-1462, 2018.
- Demiray, Mehl and Martin, Conversational Time Travel, Frontiers in Psychology 9, 2018.
- Sun, Harris and Vazire, Is well-being associated with the quantity and quality of social interactions?, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 119(6), 1478-1496, 2020.
- Data watch: daily word counts are extrapolations from short audio samples, assuming 17 waking hours for adults and 16 for participants aged 10 to 17, so they are estimates, not literal counts. The 2025 paper prints the 2007 men’s average as both 15,669 and 15,660; we use 15,669, the figure in the original report. Its raw means (13,349 vs 11,950) differ by 1,399 words while the model estimate is 1,073, and its stress analysis lists different sample sizes in the methods (966) and results (1,227). The press release rounds the individual extremes (about 100 and over 120,000 words) differently from the paper (62 and 124,134). The 2025 paper dates The Female Brain to 2007, while Mark Liberman’s first post on the book’s claim is dated August 6, 2006. In the Swiss study, older adults (n = 48) are reported as speaking in 21% of snippets, but the raw counts given (2,590 of 13,276) work out to about 19.5%, so we did not use that figure. The roughly 300-words-per-year decline was not preregistered and needs confirmation. EAR samples are mostly from the US and Europe, and most well-being studies are correlational.
Last updated: November 8, 2026. We update this roundup quarterly, and the next refresh is expected when the BLS publishes the 2026 American Time Use Survey results in mid-2027.