How many words does the average person say a day?

The average person says about 16,000 words a day, according to the study everyone cites: in 2007, psychologists who recorded 396 people through their days found that women spoke 16,215 words a day on average and men 15,669. A much larger follow-up by the same group, published in 2025, put the figure lower — 13,349 for women and 11,950 for men across 2,197 people. Both found the differences between individuals dwarf the difference between the sexes. And the words themselves are surprisingly few: a day's talk in English is made of only about 3,299 different words.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 5 min read

How it was measured

You cannot simply ask people how much they talk; nobody knows. The researchers — Matthias Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker — used a device called the Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR: a small recorder worn through the day that switches itself on for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes and captures whatever is being said. Transcribe the snippets, count the participant's own words, scale up to their waking day, and you have an estimate of how much they talk that does not depend on anyone's memory.

The 2007 study, published in Science, pooled 6 samples of this kind: 396 university students, mostly in the United States, with one sample from Mexico. Women averaged 16,215 words a day and men 15,669, a gap of 546 words that was not statistically significant. Its title asked "Are women really more talkative than men?", and its answer was: not measurably.

The 2025 follow-up

The obvious objection was the sample. Every participant was a student, and 87% of the data came from one city, Austin, Texas. So in 2025 a team including Mehl and Vazire published a registered report — the method fixed and reviewed before the results were known — in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

It pooled 22 samples, 2,197 participants and 631,030 audio recordings, from children to people in their nineties. The averages came out at 13,349 words a day for women and 11,950 for men. The gap, 1,073 words, was about twice the original one but still small, and the authors called most of the evidence inconclusive — with one exception: between early and middle adulthood, women spoke 3,275 words a day more than men.

The striking number is the spread. The least talkative people said fewer than 100 words a day and the most talkative more than 120,000. Knowing whether someone is a man or a woman tells you almost nothing about how much they talk; knowing the person tells you a great deal.

Where "20,000 words a day for women, 7,000 for men" came from

That line is from the 2006 book The Female Brain, and it has no study behind it. The linguist Mark Liberman traced it on Language Log, and when a Guardian journalist asked the author about it, she retracted the figures; the sentence was removed from later printings. It still circulates. The measured answer is the one above: roughly the same, with enormous variation between people.

A day's talk is built from very few words

Here is the part the studies do not cover, and that word-frequency data can. Take 16,000 words of ordinary English dialogue — about one person's day — and ask what they are made of. Using the word counts of 735 million words of English film and television subtitles, the closest large record of everyday speech that exists:

In 16,000 words of English you would expect only about 3,299 different words. The ten commonest words in English dialogue — you, I, the, to, a and their kind — supply about 3,664 of the 16,000 on their own. The hundred commonest supply 9,312, more than half. The thousand commonest supply 13,232, so only about one word in six that a person says all day is outside the first thousand.

Two cautions. The table is a calculation, not a recording: it draws 16,000 words at random from the pooled dialogue of thousands of films, and a real person repeats themselves more than that, so their true count of different words is probably lower still. And subtitles split contractions — it's is counted as it and 's — which the counts follow.

What this means for someone learning a language

These two facts, put together, are the argument for learning words in frequency order. Your own day of talk is around 16,000 words, but most of it is drawn from a few hundred. In English the 61 commonest words make up half of all dialogue, and the 698 commonest make up 80%. The same is roughly true of every language measured: the first thousand words cover about three quarters of what is said, which is why how many words you need to learn a language has a much smaller answer than how many words the average person knows — about 42,000, in the best estimate.

The everyday words of a language are the ones a beginner should meet first, and they are the ones Verbavia teaches first, in the order people use them. Each course's list is free to browse — Spanish, French and German, for instance — and the two-minute vocabulary test estimates how many of them you already know. How steeply each language's curve rises is compared in which language has the steepest frequency curve.

Sources

• Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Ramírez-Esparza, N., Slatcher, R. B. & Pennebaker, J. W. (2007). Are women really more talkative than men? Science 317(5834), 82. doi.org/10.1126/science.1139940
• Tidwell, C. A., Danvers, A. F., Pfeifer, V. A., … Vazire, S. & Mehl, M. R. (2025). Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered report of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 128(2), 367–391. doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000534
• University of Arizona News: Do women talk more than men? It might depend on their age. news.arizona.edu
• Schmitt, D. P. (2016). Sex differences in talkativeness. Psychology Today — the EAR's 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes. psychologytoday.com
• Liberman, M. (2006). Contagious misinformation. Language Log. languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
• Wikipedia: The Female Brain (book) — the word-count claim removed from later printings. en.wikipedia.org)
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com
• The calculation is in scripts/frequency_extras.py (day_of_talk): for each word, the chance it appears at least once in 16,000 draws, summed over the whole list.