Shocking study: Women say more words than men during adulthood

Women speak more words per day than men, but only during a very specific period of life.

Of course, that period of life is 25 to 65.

So . . .  most of adulthood, which is a strange thing to pull out like it's a weird little period of time. It's 40 years. In terms of the study's findings, 43.8 million more words are spoken by an average woman during that period than an average man.

Nearly half are asking how a man is feeling or suggesting how should drive. But I jest.

The finding – that women speak 3,000 more words daily than men during most of their adult life – is probably no surprise to most women other than Mrs. Brad. Who, if the data is true, must say many, many, many words to herself.

The study, conducted by University of Arizona researchers and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (which has a tremendous advice column and hilarious comic strips), found that the average 25- to 64-year-old woman spoke 21,845 words per day, compared to the average men of the same age, who spoke 18,570 words (my guess at most common of those male words: "Huh?" "What?" "Whatnot" and "Cool.").

For context of just how many words that is, my columns average about 600 words. The Declaration of Independence is 1,320 words. Novels are usually around 100,000 words. The Bible is about 780,000 words. That last meeting you were forced to attend featured about 1 billion words.

So the average woman says a novel's-worth of words in a five-day period. The average man needs an additional day-plus to reach that level. 

An earlier University of Arizona study from 2007 by the same researcher found that women and men each say about 16,000 words per day, but the follow-up study found differently. The first study focused primarily on college-aged people who lived near Austin, Texas (why would the University of Arizona study people who lived near the University of Texas? They're not even in the same conference!) so it wasn't seen as widely representative. This version used far more participants in multiple countries with a wider age range.

There was no signficant differences between genders for those ages 10-24 and 65 and older. But from 25-64? Hoo boy.

According to the researchers, one reason that women talk more during that period is they are generally the primary caretaker for children, so they speak more words. Others just think blah, blah, blah. (I wasn't paying attention. Sorry.)

The least talkative person in the survey spoke about 100 words a day and the most talkative spoke more than 120,000. You probably know both of those people and have probably been stuck in a longer-than-comfortable scenario with each of them.

Which is worse? Too many words or too few words? Or is a combined 40,000 words between the average man and woman OK, regardless of the division?

This column is 500 words, so only 18,070 left for me. Which is cool and whatnot.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.