How Many Words Will You Speak in a Lifetime?

How Many Words Will You Speak in a Lifetime?

How many words will you speak in a lifetime?

Is there a multiverse beyond our universe? Will we ever discover life on other worlds? Is my dog happy on that farm up-state?

These are some of the biggest questions the human race has, throughout the ages, struggled to answer.

But perhaps the biggest, most important question of our time: How many words will each of us speak before we die?

Tragically, short of recording yourself for 80+ years, we’re stuck working with math. Yay, math!

I have now spent many, many hours pouring over a bunch of moderately intelligent peoples’ rationales, reading some guy’s book, and done a bit of my own (potentially bad but I had a calculator) number crunching to come to some mediocre conclusions – all in the name of answering life’s most important question.

I’m such a humanitarian.

 

How can we even do this?

First, let’s establish that we’re hypothetically working with English native speakers from the US. That’s the largest LATG demographic and most of the studies I used while researching this piece focused on that group.

To get to a lifetime word count we have to zoom in a bit:

How many words does the average jibberjabberer jibber and jabber in a day?

A lot of people have tried to calculate a decent value, but as with many things science, disappointingly, nobody seems to agree on this number.

Oodles of people are tossing around figures that vary by tens of thousands, which doesn’t exactly inspire an awful lot of confidence in their measurement techniques. There have been dozens of studies on topics such as this and I’m really only here to scratch the surface because eventually both you and I are going to get sick of numbers and go back to to actually doing work instead of wasting time.

The numerous articles I’ve read cite seemingly credible researchers whose seemingly credible research spawns less-than-credible results. Some of these include averages ranging from 4,000 to 30,000.

What?

I’m really not good at math, and this is a fact that I will continue stating throughout this article as a way of averting responsibility for any potential errors my smartypants readers will undoubtedly find. But this aside, this kind of feels like the tragic margin of error that robs everyone of their credibility. Everybody has a different number, making their estimates little more than guesses based on paltry sample sizes.

Let’s start at the top.

860,341,500 words 

Right, so that’s a really specific, really big number. There really are 9 digits in it and that leaves me really skeptical, as it really should you.

This behemoth number is the mindspawn of British writer, actor, musician, former member of Parliament, and man of many other talents – Gyles Brandreth.

In the early 80s, Brandreth determined this number based on his presumption that the average person spoke roughly 30,000 words per day. He was extremely confident in his math – so much so that he used that number as part of a book he wrote called The Joy of Lex: How to Have Fun with 860,341,500 Words.

I took some time out to read the entirety of the Joy of Lex, and it’s a super fun book. I highly recommend it. He only spends a bit of his time addressing this issue, but I’ve tried to sum up more or less what his overall message is regarding the words we’ll speak in a lifetime.

If the average person lives to be 80 years old, and we ignore leap years and simply go with each year having 365 days, and we also agree that it’s cool to subtract people under the age of 3 because they spend, on average, much less time speaking than the rest of us, the math looks something vaguely like this:

Again, I am very bad at math.

 

Number stuff:

30,000 (words per day) x 365 (days in a year) = 10,950,000 (words per year).

77(years) x 10,950,000 = 843,150,000 (words in a lifetime)

Alas, 843,150,000 ≠ 860,000,000. But for numbers in the hundreds of millions, I guess we’re not too far off.

If we presume that we are dealing with the world’s finest infant auctioneers, we can add those 3 years back in and get an additional 3 x 10,950,000 = 32,850,000

32,850,000 + 843,150,000 = 876,150,000

Now we’re talking!

My takeaway from this is that Brandreth has way too much faith in the chattiness of infants. Little kids talk a lot, but 33 million words a lot? Forgive me if I don’t place any money on it.

However, toddler orators aside, we have to step back to the day thing because we have a huge problem on our hands that must be addressed before we can take these numbers at all seriously.

Where in Hell did we get 30,000 words per day?

How can that be?

 

I’m not so sure

I’m very bad at numbers, but if I’m not wrong, the calculations one has to use to get to an average of 860 mil would require all people to speak on average(!) around 30,000 words per day, which, I mean, really?  

One of the issues with counting things like this is that different lifestyles and occupations might require different amounts of communication, or communication in different forms. I easily write 2000 – 4,000 words per day, which doesn’t count, but may not speak much more than that, either. However, I mostly write. If I worked in a call center or managed employees of my own, or worked any number of other jobs, this could change considerably.

 

A fun note on auctioneers

Every time we need an example of someone who speaks ridiculously quickly, we tend to turn to auctioneers. These machine-gun-mouthed ramblebots are capable of slinging some serious verbiage in your direction extraordinarily fast.

Why?

According to Slate, they do it to keep their audience and buyers in a certain state of trance. The monotone they use is intentional - not a byproduct of their speed. This speed forces bidders to follow as closely as they can, potentially influencing their ability to make well thought out decisions before lifting their little bid flags.

It's also a great way to make more money. The more products you move, the more you make.

The average, conversational speed for most English speakers is between 120 and 150 words per minute. This number goes up or down depending on context, of course. Presentations and speeches and stuff tend to go a little slower while emotionally charged interactions can be a bit quicker. Auctioneers, on the other hand, speak at around 250 words per minute. Not to be outdone, though, commentators for events such as horse racing, among other things, can at times equal or even surpass auctioneers in speed. I find this potentially more impressive as the auctioneer's job consists primarily of just taking numbers and doesn't really call for the more in-depth analysis of the situation required of a commentator. You're welcome to dispute that. One of the fastest [English] talkers, however, blows both of these professions out of the water. British comedian Steven Woodmore has clocked in at a blazing 637 words, more than double that of an auctioneer. Except, he's not the world record holder. Canadian Sean Shannon has held that title since he beat Woodmore in 1995. The Guinness Book of World Records recorded him at an ablation-inducing1 655 words per minute. Here he is doing that:  

Cool, huh?

 

Times change

When Brandreth wrote his book back in the 80s, we obviously didn’t communicate the way we do now. People actually had to call each other using rotary phones – eldritch abominations that practically nobody under the age of 35 today could manage.

Those cavemen had to actually pull out pens and write letters, or worse – trudge out into the world in order to speak to people they didn’t live or work with like a bunch of uncivilized, branch-dwelling apes.2

Today, thankfully, we don’t actually have to flap our tongues nearly as often. Email, texting and instant messaging have revolutionized (in my opinion for the better) our ability to expectorate our thoughts. Some would disagree there, but the way I see it – if things were actually better then, we’d still be doing them.

But more to the point, since Brandreth didn’t count written words, neither should I. So let’s throw out the text messages, the Facebook comments, the newspaper articles, and anything else that was written down and focus simply on the words coming out of our mouths. This severely cuts into the amount those of us, particularly those of us born in or since the 80s will speak in a lifetime.

It is possible that people were simply chattier 40 years ago, but I doubt it.

Regardless of Brandreth’s thoughts on the subject, I personally find his 30,000 word estimate to be ludicrously high, and most researchers seem to agree with me. A quick Google search indicates that most writers seem to take him at face value, but clicking most of the links bring rather anemic results. It seems that people just agree and move on.

I’m not agreeing! But I am moving on:

 

Do women really talk more than men?

Ah, yes, the ages old quip about talkative ladies. Drawing the ire of many a woman and the insipid chuckles of many a bro in a popped-collared Calvin Klein polo, this is one of those annoying questions you probably already know the answer to, but that I felt merited addressing anyway.

Turns out, many researchers have looked into this, many of them semi credible, and most of them not - and the tl;dr is, not shockingly: kinda but not really all that much. Gender tendencies are another one of those sciencey things where studies show different things and nobody is happy with anyone's answer.

Some of the more credible evidence suggests that talkativity (not a word) has to do with the Foxp2 gene, which has everything to do with the development of speech and language. Women seem to have a bit more of this stuff in their systems, which can lead to the belief that it impacts their range of vocabulary, the age at which they start to speak, and a bunch of other stuff I'll probably never have time to explain and don't fully understand because genetics is hard. It should be noted though, that while women may have slightly more of this gene, these studies in particular concluded that there is virtually no difference, and come down pretty hard on this hypothesis. Other studies contradict those studies, naturally.

Another idea is that it has everything to do with social conditioning. The chatty, emotionally literate woman who expresses herself and communicates with her partner or friends, the gracious hostess in a 1950s pinup dress,  or even historical career norms that often placed women as secretaries and other "answerers of the phones." This is all contrasted against the the cultural stereotype of the "tall, dark and handsome" guy who internalizes his feelings and only speaks when he has a clever one-liner. You know, like in every movie ever. This is a bit controversial, is clearly cultural and the evidence seems to flip back and forth, because of course it does.

Also, sexism!

Most studies I discovered, unfortunately, used disappointingly small sample sizes across the board, but they seemed to come to relatively similar conclusions. Women are chattier in smaller groups, but when the number of people tops 7, men suddenly become chatterboxes. Draw your own conclusions from that. In classroom settings, men also seemed to talk a bit more. In social settings such as lunch breaks with colleagues, parties, or similar, women led the way by a wide margin, however.

While non-verbal, this can be seen clearly on social media as well. My own findings in follower engagement both on this site and on Facebook in particular show that while I have vastly more female followers across all platforms, they engage considerably less than male followers. I believe this is likely due to social factors, fear of being shouted down or talked over, and the other, usual issues that we're not going to get into here.

There's a lot more that goes into all of this, but suffice it to say that the ultimate takeaway should be that yes, women speak very slightly more, on average, overall, but that the difference is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things and we should probably all stop being dicks about it.

It should also be mentioned that essentially all of these studies appear to have focused on native English speakers, primarily in the United States. As the ways in which we interact are bound closely to our cultures, it should serve to say that other languages and their speakers almost definitely will show different results.

One huge point to women, though: Ladies seem way more interested in learning languages. My largest reader and social media follower demographic is younger women between 24 and 35, followed by women between 18 and 23.

So that's nice.

And what about other languages?

You know how people always make comments or jokes or express frustration at the speed with which certain languages that they’re learning are spoken? If I had a nickel for every time someone complained that Spanish speakers speak way too fast, I’d be able to have someone else research this article for me.

As it turns out, this might be at least partially true – and it is more about the language than it is about its speakers. Buuuuut, it’s also not necessarily about speed, either, but rather the rate of information transferred between speaker and listener.

This chart that I yoinked from the Economist breaks down several of the world’s largest languages in a more easily digestible format:

 

fastest spoken languages

 

The article goes on to illustrate something like the following:

Let’s pretend that I’m some kind of magical hyperpolyglot capable of writing fluently in all of these languages. Now let’s say that I decided to write a full translation of this article into each of those languages. The Economist article outlines how the Japanese, Spanish and French translations would naturally be longer.

On the other hand, a Thai translation would be considerably shorter in physical length.

However, it would take a fluent reader more or less the same amount of time to read each of these articles as more information is jammed into fewer words.

The study from which the Economist pulls its information is from 2019 and was performed by Christophe Coupé, Yoon Mi Oh, Dan Dediu and François Pellegrino, and published in the magazine ScienceAdvances. You can read the whole study here if you’re into this and love scientific jargon.

It’s a bit dense for most of us to follow, but it should be noted that the speeds at which these languages are clocked are less about word count and more about syllable count – which may ultimately be one of the reasons for more or fewer words being spoken over a given period of time.

So, the takeaway here should be that languages seem to convey information at about the same rate across the board – but they do so less in terms of words and more in terms of syllables, or in even more basic terms, the length of words.

Agglutination and compounding – a vocab lesson!

Still with me? Ok, good, because here’s a fun word.

Agglutination!

Agglutinative languages are those ones that glue morphemes2 together exactly as they are, without messing with their spelling, pronunciation, etc. Some examples of these include Turkish, Finnish or Quechua. They basically just remove the spaces.

It is a form of compounding, which we’re not going to go into much detail about right here because I can already see the drool running down your chin, except to say that this is how you get those big fat German words we like to make fun of.3

So, for instance, German words like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft4 or Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz5 are some of the most popular examples, but nobody actually uses them.

Back to our point, though. If your language uses tons of huge words, and we’re only counting words, you’re going to speak fewer words. 

Duh.

So basically this whole section stated the obvious. 

Ok, ok ok, but how many words do we actually speak in a lifetime?

Sadly, with estimates ranging from Gyles Brandreth’s 860 million to the “Human Footprint,” a British TV show, at 123 million, do you really think that I have the resources, time or skills to give you a truly satisfactory answer?

Looking around online I have found an insane repertoire or estimates, guesses, mediocre science and other craziness, some of it extraordinarily sexist or that appears to have been randomly pulled out of someone’s ass for promotional or business reasons. If you want a general list of a lot of different peoples’ wildly variant hypotheses, you can check out this link. It’s still wildly unhelpful, but at least it puts all the nutty stuff in one nicely consolidated place for your perusal. 

Furthermore, as I mentioned in the Women vs Men box above, the estimates as to how much men and women speak in a given day vary across tremendously sexist estimates, including this zany estimate of 2,000 words per day by men and as many as 25,000 by women. Keep in mind that this is an average, implying that some women speak way, way more than that.

Even with my sub-par math, I find that highly unlikely.

With batshit crazy results like these, I feel like giving you any sort of hard answer would be irresponsible on my part, so instead of stating beyond all shadow of a doubt that any of these are true, I must leave us all to our speculations.

I know how much you love disappointing answers, but I hope that you enjoyed this exercise in futility at least a little bit.

Don’t stop talking.

 

Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. Potentially a necromancer. All typos are my own.