The damping constants of vowel formants, as expressed in the half‐power bandwidths, have been studied from the reports of several investigators. The accuracies of methods of measurement used have been estimated through application of the same methods to an electrical analog of the vocal tract. Two new sets of measurements are presented, one on spectrograms of real speech, the other making use of an artificial larynx, applied to real subjects. It is concluded that, while wide individual variations occur, the average bandwidths for male voices probably lie in the lower range of those which have been reported.