> 10 billion words, times an average word length of 11.66, gets us ~4.8 billion individual characters spoken per person per lifetime.
Am I missing something or is this math very wrong?
Am I missing something or is this math very wrong?
If you take 16,000 words/day multiplied by 26,280 days (72 years' worth of days), you get the 420.48 million in the text.
If you take that number and multiply by 24, you get 10,091,520,000--close enough to 10 billion that I think the author made a days versus hours mistake somewhere.
The remainder of the article seems to actually use the 420.48 million number and not 10 billion, as ringshall points out.
“ roughly 10 billion words said, per person (16,000 per day * 26,280 days = ~420,480,000)“
Not sure if I completely missed something but it looks like 420m words per person.
Edit: combine these two errors and it makes sense. The 10b number is in the text but not the arithmetic.
16000 words per day * 26000 days * 11 chars per word = 4.5E9 chars per person.