“Not sure if I’m going out later”
That text is about how long the average text is. Remember that the next time you want to thumb out a novel on your phone. Well, unless you’re older or want to come across as such.
It turns out the older you are, the longer your text messages tend to be. The following tracks average characters per text by age across several thousand Americans.
Looking at men and women separately, there doesn’t seem to much of a difference between genders up until the early 20s.
After that point, women get much wordier than men. And that increase seems to rise with age. It’s worth pointing out that there’s a sizeable subset of men who will write shorter responses as they enter their late 30s, but they’ve been more than offset by the more verbose ones, at least in our data.
So the next time your mom writes an essay or your teenage kid seems too busy to give you the time of day, remember, that’s just how they text.
