Hot wire measurements of longitudinal and transverse increments are performed in three different types of flows on a large range of Reynolds numbers (100≲Rλ≲3000). An improved technique based on cumulant expansion of velocity structure functions is used to estimate the spreading of the pdfs and to study their scaling properties in the inertial range. Thus, the rate of intermittency depth through the scales of flow, called here β(Rλ), is experimentally introduced, and it is shown that β(Rλ) has a universal behavior on a very large Reynolds numbers range. © 1998 American Institute of Physics.