According to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, the commonly-held believe that women talk a lot more than men is a myth. An article I came across today gives details of the research, which discovered that both men and women use around 16,000 words per day on average.
Between 1998 and 2004, the researchers analysed the daily interactions of 400 university students from the USA and Mexico using unobtrusive digital recorders. The subjects were not aware when they were being recorded – the recorders were set to automatically record for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes – and had no control over the recorders.
The exact averages were 16,215 words for women and 15,669 for men, so women do talk more, on average, than men, but the difference isn’t huge. The researchers also noticed significant individual variations with differences of up to 45,000 words a day between the most and least talkative people.
How many word do you think you use per day?
I wonder if any studies have been done to discover how many distinct words we use each day and how often we repeat ourselves.
