Spectra of running speech of eight female subjects were determined for two conditions: loud reading and reading of the same text in whispered mode. The subjects were seated in a sound isolated booth. A12‐in.measuring microphone was 10 cm from the lips of the reader. The spectrum analyzer Nicolet UA 500 A was employed. The average spectrum of the eight subjects had a pronounced maximum at 300 Hz when the speech was loud. Between 500 and 1200 Hz the slope was around −17 dB/oct, and between 1.8 and 14 kHz the slope was −3.7 dB/oct. The whispered speech had very similar spectrum in the upper frequency range mentioned above. The spectrum had the same average slope. Below 1000 Hz the average whispered speech spectrum was rather flat. The differences between whispered and loud spectral levels in this range reached around 20‐dB values.