Tootsie Pop ‘How Many Licks’ Mystery Solved

The age old question has been answered. Now we DO know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

Thanks to Jinzi Huang and his coworkers at New York University's Courant Institute and a study they published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, it takes about 1,000 licks per centimeter of candy to reach the middle of a Tootsie Pop.

Let's break that down into easier to understand terms. With the diameter of a Tootsie Pop measuring approximately 1.063 inches, it has to be licked about 2,500 times for someone to make it to the middle.

So start licking...and don't bite!