STFU

Husbands everywhere will tell you that their wives talk too much. Wives everywhere will disagree and tell you that the only reason Cory Booker managed to speak 25 hours without stopping is because he has no wife so nobody tells him to STFU.

But how much do men and women really speak during an average day? That is clearly a question of the highest importance, so Colin Tidwell and his 35(!) co-authors recorded 2,197 people over 22 samples for a total of 631,030 audio recordings. Imagine the discussions in that team about how to structure the research report…

The chart below shows the distribution of average words spoken per day by the participants. At the bottom of the ‘onion’ you can see what I call the Kimi Raikkonnen fan club. People who sometimes speak less than 100 words per day. Meanwhile, at the top you can find some people who are speaking an estimated 50,000 words per day, more than four times the average. How?

Distribution of estimated number of words spoken per day

Source: Tidwell et all. (2025)

Meanwhile the average number of words spoken per day for men is 11,950. Women on average speak 13,349 words per day, some 10% more than men.

However, talkativeness changes as we age. The chart below shows the average number of words spoken by men and women in different age groups. Notably, there is only a small difference between men and women who are teenagers or young adults. Only during adulthood proper do we see a pattern of women speaking substantially more words per day than men. Once retired it isn’t really the women that are the chatterboxes. Older men on average speak more than women. And I guess I will shut up now and leave you with these numbers to debate with your other half.

Differences in words spoken by age group

Source: Tidwell et al. (2025)