The lifetime prevalence, or the proportion of individuals expected to stutter at one time in their lives, is about 5%, and overall males are affected two to five times more often than females. Most stuttering begins in early childhood and according studies suggest 2.5% of children under the age of 5 stutter. The sex ratio appears to widen as children grow: among preschoolers, boys who stutter outnumber girls who stutter about two to one, or less, but widens to three to one at first grade and five to one at fifth grade, due to higher recovery rates in girls. Due to high (approximately 65–75%) rates of early recovery, the overall prevalence of stuttering is generally considered to be approximately 1%.

Stuttering occurs in all cultures and races, and at similar rates.A US-based study indicated that there were no racial or ethnic differences in the incidence of stuttering in preschool children.

Lewis Carroll, the well-known author of Alice in Wonderland, was afflicted with a stammer, as were his siblings.

For centuries stuttering has featured prominently in society at large. Because of the unusual-sounding speech that is produced, as well as the behaviors and attitudes that accompany a stutter, stuttering has been a subject of scientific interest, curiosity, discrimination, and ridicule. Stuttering was, and essentially still is, a riddle with a long history of interest and speculation into its causes and cures. Stutterers can be traced back centuries to the likes of Demosthenes, who tried to control his disfluency by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.The Talmud interprets Bible passages to indicate Moses was also a stutterer, and that placing a burning coal in his mouth had caused him to be “slow and hesitant of speech” (Exodus 4, v.10)

Partly due to a perceived lack of intelligence because of his stutter, the man who became the Roman Emperor Claudius was initially shunned from the public eye and excluded from public office.

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, surgical interventions for stuttering were recommended, including cutting the tongue with scissors, removing a triangular wedge from the posterior tongue, cutting nerves, and neck and lip muscles. Others recommended shortening the uvula or removing the tonsils. All were abandoned due to the high danger of bleeding to death and their failure to stop stuttering. Less drastically, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard placed a small forked golden plate under the tongue in order to support “weak” muscles.

Blessed Notker of St. Gall (ca. 840–912), called Balbulus (”The Stutterer”) and described by his biographer as being “delicate of body but not of mind, stuttering of tongue but not of intellect, pushing boldly forward in things Divine,” was invoked against stammering. Other famous Englishmen who stammered were King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led the UK through World War II. Although George VI went through years of speech therapy for his stammer, Churchill thought that his own very mild stutter added an interesting element to his voice: “Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience…”

For centuries “cures” such as consistently drinking water from a snail shell for the rest of one’s life, “hitting a stutterer in the face when the weather is cloudy”, strengthening the tongue as a muscle, and various herbal remedies were used. Similarly, in the past people have subscribed to theories about the causes of stuttering which today are considered odd. Proposed causes of stuttering have included tickling an infant too much, eating improperly during breastfeeding, allowing an infant to look in the mirror, cutting a child’s hair before the child spoke his or her first words, having too small a tongue, or the “work of the devil.”