Every Type of Mnemonic Device, With Examples

A mnemonic device (pronounced "nuh-MON-ik", first m silent, from the Greek mneme, memory) is any deliberate trick that makes something easier to remember by attaching it to something you already remember well: a phrase, a rhyme, a picture, a place. That covers everything from "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" to the memory palaces competitors use to learn a shuffled deck of cards in under twenty seconds. The promise of this page is a testable one: on the way through it you will memorise a ten-item shopping list, and there is a drill on this site that will score you on it cold.

Every type of mnemonic device at a glance

Ask the web how many types there are and you get five, nine or three. Wikipedia lists nine (in plain words songs, acronyms, acrostics, diagrams, rhymes, structured notes, pictures, connections to what you already know, and memory palaces); the usual five are acronyms and acrostics, rhymes and songs, chunking, images, and the method of loci; and this page sorts fourteen devices into five families by the three levers in the next section. The grouping matters more than the count: devices that share a mechanism share a ceiling, which is the last column, and the section headings below carry the families.

Why mnemonics work: three levers

Francis Bellezza's 1981 review called these devices cueing structures: a framework you already hold (the alphabet, a rhyme, your own house) that you attach new material to, so that walking the framework hands the material back. Every device pulls on at least one of three levers, and the lever tells you what it is good for.

Compression. In 1956 George Miller put the span of immediate memory at about seven items, plus or minus two, and observed that people beat the limit by recoding several items into one larger chunk. Acronyms, acrostics and chunking are pure compression.

Imagery. Words are hard to hold; pictures are easy. In 1969 Gordon Bower and Michal Clark had students learn twelve lists of ten unrelated nouns, one group weaving each list into a story. On all 120 words the story group's median recall was 93 per cent, the control group's 13. Link, story, substitute-word and keyword mnemonics pull this lever.

Structure. In 1980 Henry Roediger trained 150 undergraduates in one of four mnemonics (imagery, the link method, a peg system or the method of loci) on twenty-word lists. All four beat controls on how many words came back, but when each word had to come back in its right position only the peg and loci groups excelled on the immediate test; the link group was intermediate and imagery alone did no better than control. Mnemonics, he concluded, have a bigger effect on the ordering of recall than on the amount. A memory palace pulls all three levers at once, which is why it sits at the core of most competitors' toolkits and takes the most work to set up.

Compression mnemonics: acronyms, acrostics and chunking

An acronym packs the initial letters into a word; an acrostic spreads them across a sentence, so the letters need not spell anything. How does a mnemonic differ from an acronym? One is a category and the other a member of it: an acronym becomes a mnemonic only when you use it to recall the things behind the letters. Nobody uses NASA to remember "National Aeronautics and Space Administration"; HOMES exists only to hand you the five Great Lakes. The classics:

They take ten seconds to learn, and they cue only the first letter of each item: HOMES is useless to someone who has never heard of Lake Huron, because H on its own points at nothing. If you cannot produce the items from their first letters, you need an image mnemonic instead.

Here is one built from scratch for the five families on this page: compression, sound, image, ordered systems and models. C, S, I, O and M spell nothing and the list is unordered, so rearrange them until they make a sentence you can picture: Clever Sisters Invent Odd Mnemonics. Say it twice, picture the sisters arguing over a whiteboard, and the taxonomy of this article is yours.

Chunking is the type people ask about most ("is chunking a mnemonic device?"), and the answer is yes, in Miller's own sense. It is also the weakest device here for anything longer than a few minutes, because the chunks are still meaningless digits with nothing to hold them overnight. The Major System is what chunking grows into once each chunk gets a picture.

Sound mnemonics: rhymes and songs

"Thirty days hath September" and "I before E, except after C" survive because a rhyme is self-checking: a wrong word breaks the metre and you hear the error. The alphabet song is how children learn twenty-six items in fixed order before they can read. The weakness is supply: a rhyme has to exist or be written, and writing one for the twelve cranial nerves by Thursday is not a good use of Thursday. Songs also replay from the start, so pulling one fact from the middle is slow. They suit a rule you will say aloud for the rest of your life, not fresh material in bulk.

Image mnemonics: the link and story method

This is the family where the real skill lives: turn each item into a concrete picture, then make each picture do something to the next. Lorayne and Lucas's 1974 The Memory Book gives the rule for a picture that sticks: out of proportion, in action, exaggerated, or one thing substituted for another. A carton of milk next to some eggs is forgettable; a carton splitting open and a dozen eggs tumbling out is not. Here is the ten-item list from this site's grocery challenge, chained. Read it slowly and picture each scene.

You open your front door and a giant carton of milk is wedged in the frame; you push, it cracks open, and huge eggs tumble out with a splash across the hall floor. One egg rolls to your feet and cracks, and instead of a chick a warm loaf of bread climbs out. The loaf tries to walk off, slips on a heap of bananas, and lands on its back. A banana peels itself, and inside the skin, instead of fruit, is a long yellow ribbon of cheese. You pull the cheese and it keeps coming, with bright orange carrots growing out of it like roots. You snap off a carrot and stir an enormous mug of coffee with it, so big you have to lean over the rim. The mug tips, and what pours out is not coffee but dry white rice, rattling across the tiles. The grains pop like popcorn into shiny red apples, so the floor is suddenly rolling with them. You squeeze one, and out shoots a slippery bar of soap in a cloud of bubbles that fills the hall.

Now cover the list and walk the chain from the door to the soap. If you built the pictures rather than reading them, you have all ten in order, and most will still be there tomorrow. The ten-grocery challenge uses this exact list: it scores your recall before you see a story and again after, and needs no account. The link method guide takes the technique to twenty words and covers what to do when a join breaks. The ceiling is the chain itself: one weak image loses everything downstream, and there is no way to jump to item seven without walking from item one.

The keyword method: names and foreign words

The substitute-word idea has a formal version for vocabulary. Richard Atkinson and Michael Raugh described it in 1975 as a two-stage link: an acoustic link from the foreign word to an English word that sounds like part of it (the keyword), then an imagery link from the keyword to the meaning through a picture in which the two interact. Their Russian-vocabulary students beat an unconstrained (free-study) control group. Take the Spanish pato, meaning duck. The keyword is "pot"; the picture is a duck sitting in a pot on the stove, lid rattling, quacking as the water warms. Later, pato sounds like pot, pot brings the duck, and you have the meaning. The honest limit is that the keyword cues the sound of the word, not its spelling or grammar, so you still have to hear it and use it.

The same move handles names: "Priya" becomes a prayer, "Chen" a chain, and the picture is pinned to a feature of the face. The names and faces guide is that method step by step, the keyword method guide covers vocabulary in depth, and the reading page on this site shows keyword and story tooltips on words from any pack you have adopted.

Ordered systems: pegs, the Major System, PAO and memory palaces

Ordered systems bring their own structure, learned once and reused for years: the answer to Roediger's finding that position is where mnemonics pay off most.

Rhyme, shape and alphabet pegs. "One is a bun, two is a shoe, three is a tree" gives you ten fixed images with numbers attached: hang item six on a bundle of sticks, and "what was number six?" has a direct answer. Number-shape pegs (one is a candle, two is a swan) do the same from the outline of the digit, and the alphabet gives you twenty-six more for free (A is an ape, B is a bee, C is the sea). Ten is the honest ceiling for rhymes and shapes and twenty-six for letters. The peg system guide covers all three kinds.

The Major System. To get past twenty-six pegs you need a way to turn any number into a word. Each digit maps to a consonant sound (1 is t or d, 2 is n, 3 is m, and so on), vowels are free, and any number spells words: thirteen is T and M, so tomb; forty-two is R and N, so rain. Learn a fixed word for each number from 00 to 99 and you have a hundred pegs, enough for a hundred-item list by position.

13major?tombA sarcophagus in a stone chamber. Mummy bandages, the T·M sound a sealed lid sliding shut.

The chart of all hundred pegs has one for every number, with Anki decks to download, and the Major System guide teaches the sounds in twenty minutes and builds the hundred pegs in about two weeks at ten minutes a day, with several weeks more of drilling before they arrive without thinking.

Dominic and PAO. Competitors turn each two-digit pair into a person (the Dominic System uses initials: 1 is A and 3 is C, so 13 is someone with the initials A.C.) and give each person a characteristic action and object. A six-digit number becomes one person doing another's action with a third's object: a single scene. The PAO guide explains the compression, the PAO list guide is about building your own set, and the deck of cards guide applies the same trick to a shuffled deck.

The method of loci. Cicero tells the story in De Oratore: the poet Simonides stepped out of a banquet moments before the roof collapsed, and identified the crushed guests by remembering where each had been sitting. The order of the places, he concluded, preserves the order of the things. The anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (about 86 to 82 BCE) is the earliest surviving manual. The method is simply this: choose a route through a place you know, fix ten or twenty locations along it in order, and put one image at each. To recall, walk the route. The method of loci guide builds your first route, the stock palaces on this site are ready-drawn routes if you would rather borrow one, and a Major peg per number is how the presidents guide keeps every president in order, with a route as an optional second address. Here is one stop.

16 · Lincolnpresidents?Abraham LincolnLincoln, stovepipe hat, presents the Emancipation Proclamation on a 16-inch silver dish to Congress.

Model and diagram mnemonics

The last family does not store items at all. A model mnemonic is a drawing or spatial arrangement that shows how facts relate: a timeline, a tree diagram of a chapter, a mind map. A diagram helps you understand a structure and see its gaps; it does not, on its own, make the facts come back on demand. Draw the tree, then peg or palace the leaves.

Which type for which job

Which type is most effective depends on the job; the last column is the guide that does it in full.

How to build your own mnemonic in five steps

Every device above is one recipe with different ingredients.

1. Isolate the cue. Decide what will be present when you need the memory and what must come back: for a name the cue is the face, for a list the previous item or a numbered peg. A vague cue fails at retrieval however vivid the image.
2. Make it concrete. Concrete nouns picture themselves; abstract words get a stand-in (a gavel for justice); sounds get a substitute word (pot for pato); numbers get a Major peg.
3. Make it interact. One image must do something to the other: a duck in a pot, not a duck and a pot.
4. Exaggerate the join, not the scene. Size, number, motion, sound, discomfort, applied where the two images meet. Involve yourself where you can; a wax drip on your own hand outlasts one you watch.
5. Test cold. Wait ten minutes, then retrieve it from the cue alone. Whatever fails, rebuild with a stronger join and test again tomorrow. A mnemonic that has never been retrieved is a draft.

Do mnemonic devices work?

Competitive memorisers are not a different species. In 2003 Eleanor Maguire and colleagues scanned competitors from events such as the World Memory Championships against matched controls: the competitors scored no higher on tests of general intellectual ability and showed no structural brain differences. What separated them was a spatial learning strategy that engaged the hippocampus and other regions used in navigation. In 2017 Martin Dresler's group compared 23 of the world's top-50 memory athletes with 23 controls matched for age, sex and IQ (the seventeen athletes who sat the word test recalled 70.8 of 72 words against 39.9 for their controls), then ran a separate training study on 51 novices. The group that practised the method of loci for forty daily half-hour sessions over six weeks went from about 26 to about 62 of 72 words, far ahead of both an active and a passive control group; their connectivity, scanned before and after training, shifted towards the athletes' pattern; and a memory test four months later found the gain largely held.

The classroom evidence is strongest where you might least expect it: Thomas Scruggs and Margo Mastropieri's 2000 research synthesis of mnemonic instruction for students with learning and behaviour problems found a mean effect size of 1.62, which they called unusually large and which closely replicated a synthesis from the 1980s. The honest summary: mnemonic devices work for nearly everyone who builds the images rather than reading about them, the effect is largest for ordered lists, and the gain is in storage and retrieval, not insight.

The honest limits

They store facts, not understanding. A mnemonic will give you the twelve cranial nerves in order; it will not tell you what any of them does. For an argument, a proof or a skill, the device is only a scaffold.

They fade unless revisited. A 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues covered 839 assessments across 317 experiments: spaced review beat a single massed session across the board, and the best gap between reviews grew with how long the memory had to last. The spaced repetition guide covers the schedule. On this site, palace practice queues whichever loci are most overdue on their SM-2 due date (a never-reviewed locus counts as due now), records an easy, hard or miss grade for each and sets its next due date; turning up for the session is still yours.

They cost effort up front. The link method is free; a hundred Major pegs cost about two weeks at ten minutes a day to build and several weeks more to make automatic; a PAO set and a stock of palaces cost weeks more again.

Reused structures interfere. Two lists on the same ten pegs in one afternoon crowd each other, and a palace route reused before the old images have faded blurs. The fix is cheap: a second peg list or a separate route for anything that must stay alive alongside something else.

A two-week plan and where to go next

Days one and two. Build the acrostic and the grocery chain on this page, do the ten-grocery challenge and keep both scores. Tomorrow, before looking at anything, recall both lists.

Days three to seven. One new list a day with the link method. Read the link method guide on day four and try its twenty-word list; on day six learn the ten rhyme pegs from the peg system guide and use them on a real list by position.

Week two. Learn the Major sounds from the Major System guide and the first twenty pegs from the chart; the ten-minute Major journey walks you through the sounds and your first deck. Build a ten-location route from the loci guide and put a list on it. On day fourteen, recall every list from the fortnight and take the grocery challenge again, cold.

By then the full library of technique guides is a toolbox rather than a reading list. Start with the challenge: ten minutes, no account, and a number to beat.