Folk wisdom and some scientists have long maintained that women speak far more than men do. One oft-quoted set of figures has it that women use on average 20,000 words per day, whereas men get by with a measly 7,000. But when a team of scientists actually recorded hundreds of men and women for several days, the researchers found no significant difference.

The investigators, from the Universities of Arizona, Texas, and Washington, determined that men and women both used on average about 16,000 words each day, they report today in the journal Science. The experiment did not, however, track which gender actually said more with those 16,000 words. —Rich Monastersky