“I’m genuinely sorry” lands better than “I’m really sorry”, even though the two mean almost the same thing. A pair of studies shows that people reach for longer words when they apologize, and that listeners read those longer words as a sign of greater remorse.
The research is by Shiri Lev-Ari, a psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her paper, “Sorries seem to have the harder words“, was published online in the British Journal of Psychology on May 7, 2025, and appears in the November 2025 issue.
Effort as a signal
Apologies are cheap. They take little effort and are easy to fake, which raises the question of how an apologizer convinces anyone they mean it. Earlier research found that apologies seem more sincere when the apologizer pays a cost, such as offering compensation or going out of their way to deliver the message.
Lev-Ari tested whether the words themselves can carry that cost. Longer words take more effort to produce because they require more motor actions to say or type, and she reasoned that people might use them to signal effort.
Apologies on X run longer, word by word
In the first study, she collected 50 apologies from social media, mostly X: 25 from celebrities and 25 from ordinary users. For each person she also gathered ten of their other posts for comparison. After stripping out usernames, links, hashtags and common filler words, she measured the median word length in every post.
Apology posts contained significantly longer words than the same people’s other posts, by about one letter per word. Celebrities and private users showed the same pattern, which matters because celebrities might have PR teams drafting their apologies.
The effect held when she controlled for the emotional tone of the posts. It also survived when she removed every word related to apologizing, such as “sorry”, “regret” and “apologize”. So it was not simply that apology words happen to be long.
The apologies were also far longer overall. Celebrity apologies averaged about 192 words, compared with 38 words for their other posts.
Readers notice the length
In the second study, 49 native English speakers from the United Kingdom ranked sets of three nearly identical apologies. The versions differed only in a few swapped words that were short and common, short and rare, or long and rare.
Apologies with longer words were ranked as more apologetic than versions with short words of similar rarity. Word frequency made no difference in either study: people did not use rarer words when apologizing, and rarer words did not make an apology seem more remorseful.
Lev-Ari calls this “dynamic iconicity”, where a word’s form signals something about the speaker’s intent in context rather than anything in the word’s dictionary meaning.
The limits of the test
She notes that the swapped words in the second study were not perfect synonyms and were shown without context. The study also measured how apologetic people seemed, not whether the apology was accepted.
All the apologies were written and in English, so it remains open whether the same holds in spoken conversation or other languages. For anyone drafting an apology email, though, the data point one way: “genuinely” beats “really”.
Study Details:
- Title: Sorries seem to have the harder words
- Authors: Shiri Lev-Ari
- Journal: British Journal of Psychology
- Publication Date: May 7, 2025 (online); November 2025 issue
- DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12790