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.
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:
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:
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 this article about whether women speak more than men6, 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. All typos are my own.
