Speaking

How to stop saying like

Q: Should I try to remove like completely?

No. Approximating with like is often the honest choice, and quoting with it is normal in conversation. Removing every instance produces speech that sounds rehearsed and oddly formal. Target the hedge, keep the rest, and let context decide.

Published September 23, 2026

Most advice on this treats like as one bad habit with one fix. It isn't. You are saying four different words that happen to share a spelling, and only one of them is quietly costing you. Cut all four and you sound like someone reading a deposition.

First, work out which like you are saying

Listen to a recording of yourself and sort every instance into one of these:

The quotative. "She was like, absolutely not." You are reporting speech, or an attitude, without claiming the exact words.
The approximator. "It took like twenty minutes." You are marking a number as an estimate.
The hedge. "It's like, the best option we have." You are softening a claim before anyone has challenged it.
The focus marker. "The problem was like, nobody owned it." You are pointing at the part of the sentence that matters.

These behave differently, they show up in different situations, and they carry different costs. Almost everyone who says like constantly is heavy on one of them, not evenly spread across all four.

Like is not a filler word

This is where the standard advice goes wrong. Um is a stall: it buys planning time, as the research on uh and um describes. Like usually is not. It is doing grammatical and social work in the sentence.

The linguist Alexandra D'Arcy spent a career on this and published an eight-hundred-year history of the word in 2017. Her conclusion, in her own framing, is that like is neither new nor a single monolithic thing: it is multifunctional, deeply established in English, and governed by regular grammatical constraints rather than sloppiness. The teenager stereotype is an ideology about who speaks, not a description of the word.

Why that matters practically: you cannot fix like by deciding to hate it. You fix the one use that is undermining you and leave the grammar alone.

The hedge is the one that costs you

"It's like, probably the right call." "I was like, kind of surprised." Here like is a pre-emptive apology. You are lowering the stakes on your own claim before the room has reacted to it, and the listener hears exactly that: a person who is not ready to stand behind what they just said.

In a performance review, a pitch, or a technical disagreement, that is the whole cost of the word. Not that it sounds young. That it sounds uncommitted.

The fix is not a substitution. It is a decision. Before the sentence, decide whether you believe the thing:

You believe it: "It's the right call."
You half-believe it: say the uncertainty in words that carry information. "I'd put it at seventy percent." "I think so, but I haven't checked the numbers."

Notice that the second option is not less hedged. It is hedged precisely, which reads as careful rather than uncertain.

The approximator is usually fine

"Like twenty minutes" is doing honest work: it marks the number as rough. The alternatives are to give a real figure, or to say "about twenty minutes", which is the same hedge in more formal clothes.

Swap it when precision is available and matters, and leave it alone when it isn't. Nobody has ever lost a deal over "like twenty minutes".

The quotative depends on the room

"He was like, we'll fix it next quarter" is standard in conversation and has been for decades. In a status update or an interview, it reads as loose, mostly because it blurs whether you are quoting or paraphrasing.

The swap is easy because the more precise version is also shorter: "He said we'd fix it next quarter." Or, when you are summarising an attitude rather than words, say so: "His position was that it could wait."

How to stop saying like in every sentence

Work on one type at a time. Trying to catch every like at once fails for the same reason crash diets fail: too many simultaneous rules, no feedback, and the first slip feels like total failure.

A week is usually enough per type. Record two minutes daily, count only the hedges, and let the rest through. When the hedge count drops without you thinking about it, move to the quotative if it is still bothering you.

The counting matters more than the willpower. You cannot change a pattern you cannot hear, and you will not hear it live for the first few weeks.

When it is "like and um" together

Fix um first. The two have different causes and different cures: um comes from planning gaps and responds to slower openings, shorter sentences, and rehearsed transitions. Like comes from commitment and responds to deciding what you think before you open your mouth.

Chase both in the same session and you typically move neither. Start with the planning fixes for um, which are more mechanical, then come back to the hedge once your sentences have room in them.

Is saying like unprofessional?

Two things are true at once, and pretending otherwise is why most advice on this subject is useless.

The judgment is real. People do read heavy like use as unserious, and that judgment is applied unevenly, landing hardest on young speakers and on women. It is prejudice dressed as a standard, and the linguistic record does not support it.

And in a high-stakes room, hedged claims still land softer than committed ones, whatever the word doing the hedging. That part is not prejudice; it is how certainty is communicated.

So the useful move is narrow. Drop the hedge where the stakes are high, because it is genuinely weakening your point. Keep the rest of your speech, and don't accept the premise that how you talk with your friends needs correcting.

Common questions

Is saying like unprofessional?

The judgment is real, and it is unevenly applied: the same speech pattern is read as casual in one speaker and careless in another. But you can hold both facts at once. Linguistically, like is an ordinary feature of English with centuries of history. Practically, in an interview or a board update, hedged claims still sound less certain than committed ones. Cut it where the stakes are high, and stop apologising for it everywhere else.

Why do I say like in every sentence?

Usually because one specific use has become automatic, not because you are saying the same word four different ways at random. Most heavy users lean on the hedge, softening claims they are not certain they want to commit to. Record two minutes, write down every like you hear, and sort them by type. The pattern is normally lopsided.

How do I stop saying like and um at the same time?

Fix um first. Um is a planning signal, so it responds to slower openings, shorter sentences, and prepared transitions. Like is a commitment problem, and it responds to deciding what you actually believe before you say it. They have different causes, so chasing both in one session usually means fixing neither.

Should I try to remove like completely?

No. Approximating with like is often the honest choice, and quoting with it is normal in conversation. Removing every instance produces speech that sounds rehearsed and oddly formal. Target the hedge, keep the rest, and let context decide.

Where to start tomorrow

Record two minutes answering a question you actually care about. Write out every like, label each one quotative, approximator, hedge, or focus, and count the columns. Then spend a week on the tallest one.

Reference: D'Arcy, A. (2017). Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight hundred years of LIKE. John Benjamins.