There is a steady decline in the number of words spoken per day.

Younger people have lost more spoken words per day than older adults have.

Researchers have found no firm evidence of a consistent sex difference in speaking across all ages.

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........

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