It's certainly a far smaller difference than has been previously cited by experts, including one expert that thought the difference was actually above 10,000 words per day. The study shows that both women and men use roughly 16,000 words a day, according to the latest research. "We weren't necessarily surprised that there wasn't a big difference between men and women, but we didn't expect there to be no difference whatsoever," said Matthias Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and one of the authors of the study.  Mehl said no one knows for sure where the stereotype that women talk more than men came from, but psychologists think it probably has to do with what men and women talk about, not how many words they use.

Women tend to talk more about their feelings and relationships -- topics that usually make men clam up. "My best guess would be that the (stereotype) comes from an attempt to explain conflict behavior among the sexes," Mehl said. "The woman demands to talk about it, the man withdraws verbally, and then people over-generalize from this behavior. The woman wanting to talk about a problem suddenly becomes women always want to talk and men never want to talk." The study used audio clips from university students who agreed to be recorded for several days at a time between 1998 and 2004. The recording equipment, specially designed for studies that require listening to natural language use, would turn on automatically for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes. The subjects could not control when the equipment was turned on or off. Researchers then described the snippets of conversation, counted the words used, and extrapolated that number to get an idea of how many words each person used in a day.