How many words do we hear a day?

According to research by the University of Arizona, people tend to talk an average of 16,000 words a day, and contrary to popular belief, it's about the same for women as it is for men.

That's an awful lot of words! Although apparently some of the chattier participants uttered around 47,000 per day, which roughly equates to a word every second for twelve hours non-stop, which makes you wonder whether anyone managed to get a word in edgeways.

So think how many words we must be exposed to throughout our daily lives. It's almost impossible to calculate! For a starter, there's all the conversations we overhear but don't pay attention to, or the constant background buzz from the media, never mind the conversations we're actually participating in.

I was thinking about all these things, and trying to come up with a way to estimate how many words we hear a day, and I had this sudden brain wave. One of the hearing instruments we are currently fitting, the Oticon Epoq XW, is actually able to log how much time the wearer has been speaking, and how much time they've been listening to speech. (It uses this technology as part of its noise reduction system.)

On average I've found the DataLogging to show listening to be around the 70% mark, and 30% for speaking. So if we take our daily average of 16,000 words, and take that to be the 30%, then we're probably hearing somewhere around 35,000 words a day. (If anyone knows of any actual scientific research into this, I'd love to hear from them.)

Conversation Stoppers

With that many words floating around, it helps us realise how important conversation is to the human race. It's a fundamental part of our very existence. It's as essential to our effectiveness at work and in life, as it is to our relationships.

But ironically, if we miss something important, we may not even realise it. It's like the fisherman who notices a hole in his net… he'll always be wondering whether he let the best catch of his life slip through, unless of course he checked them before he went fishing

Part of what we wanted to achieve with our bus adverts was to remind ourselves how fantastic conversations can be. Sometimes they can quite literally change our lives. But we can never know when one like that will come along. The deal of the century. The career opportunity of our dreams. The beginnings of a wonderful friendship. The insight that changes our direction.

But of course, to be ready for it, we need to be sure our hearing is ready. No holes! It means checking the net before we let one slip away, rather than living with "what if?"