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We spend a good portion of our lives texting, DM-ing, and emailing. Is all of this electronic, written communication decreasing the amount of time we are speaking to other humans? Recent research suggests that the answer is yes and that the average amount of spoken words seems to decline with each passing year.
A group of researchers recently (Tidwell et al., 2025) estimated the amount of daily words spoken from a sample of about 2,200 participants from the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The average number of spoken words per day was 12,792. They compared this to a similar study published in 2007. In that year, the average number of spoken words per day was nearly 16,000.
In a more recent study, researchers estimated that the amount of speaking is declining by about 300 daily words per year (Pfeifer & Mehl, 2026). While this reduction in speaking may seem trivial, the researchers speculate on what we are losing.
“While putting a number to the loss, there is much about those lost conversations that these data cannot answer. Were they lost with friends, or family, or with strangers? Were they lost equally for everyone, or just for a select few? What were those conversations about? And, more consequentially, can we quantify the individual and societal costs of lost spoken conversations?”
An important question is whether electronic communication, such as texting, is compensating for the loss of spoken words. Of course, that would mean that younger people, who are more likely than older adults to communicate electronically, should have a larger decline in words spoken, and the researchers found that was indeed the case, with participants below 25 years of age having a 451-word-per-day loss, compared to older adults losing 314 words per day.
Who Speaks More, Men or Women?
This research on spoken words also addressed the question of sex differences in speaking. Although the common stereotype is that women speak more than men, the 2007 study did not find a significant difference between the number of daily words spoken by women and men. The more recent study explored gender differences in more depth. They found sex differences were affected by the age of the participants, with adolescent and young adult women speaking more than men, but older adult males speaking slightly more than their female counterparts. All in all, the researcher concluded that there was no firm evidence of a consistent sex difference in speaking across all ages.
