A Complete PAO List, 00 to 99

Six digits in one picture. That is the whole promise of a PAO list, and the table below is a complete one: a hundred rows, 00 to 99, each holding a Person, an Action and an Object fixed for good, because a peg that changes is not a peg. Every person's name encodes their own number in Major System sounds, so 42 is Ronaldo and Ronaldo is 42 and you never have to look the row up twice.

A list like this is the usual first serious number system, and it costs a hundred rows of homework. This page is that homework, done. Adopt it whole, swap the rows that do not land for you, or read the rule above the table and write your own hundred from scratch.

What this page is not is an explanation of the technique. The PAO article covers how the encoding works and why competitors reach for it on cards, and the Dominic System covers the person-and-action system that predates PAO. Read either of those for the why, or the technique hub for the guides around them. This page is the raw material.

What a PAO list is, and what it buys

A PAO list is a table of a hundred rows. Each row owns one two-digit number and holds three things that never move: a Person, an Action that person is always doing, and an Object they are always doing it with. The list is not used a row at a time. It is used three rows at a time, and the composition rule is rigid, which is the point.

The first pair gives the Person. The second pair gives the Action. The third pair gives the Object.

Always that order, every time, with no improvising. The roles are fixed by position rather than by what the row happens to be good at, which is what makes the reading reversible; there is a worked example below.

The reason to pay the hundred-row price is throughput. One image standing on one locus carries a different number of digits depending on what you built to put there.

The middle row is the Dominic System, which costs the same hundred people and buys four digits rather than six. With a plain Major peg from the 00-99 peg chart a sixty-digit string needs thirty images and thirty places to put them; with PAO the same string needs ten. Against that, a hundred rows is genuinely a hundred rows: three hundred items, each of which has to become automatic, and learning most of them does not get you most of the benefit. A PAO list with holes in it stalls on the holes. If that trade does not look worth it for the numbers you actually memorise, the peg chart is the shorter road: two digits per image for a good deal less work, and it reads in both directions from the start, which a PAO list only does after weeks of deliberate reverse drilling.

That ratio is also why a hundred rows are not the end of the road. Alex Mullen, a three-time world champion, used a two-digit PAO system in his first year of training and then left it behind: since 2014 he has run a three-digit system of a thousand single images placed two to a locus, plus a 1,352-image two-card system that reuses most of them, across roughly three thousand places in about eighty memory palaces, trained on about half an hour a day. Some competitors graduate off a two-digit PAO the way he did. Many do not: the standing IAM speed cards record was set with PAO, and Wiederhold's survey of the sport lists PAO and the three-digit system as the two most commonly used by top competitors. Mullen is clear about who each is for: a system like his for anyone serious about competing at the highest level; for everyone else, a basic two-digit or one-card system, which he reckons can be put together in under an hour. This list is not that, as the honest limits below say. If you ever outgrow the hundred rows there are two step-ups and they are easy to confuse: a three-digit single-image system like his, a thousand images carrying three digits each, or a three-digit PAO, a thousand rows carrying nine digits an image and costing three thousand items to build.

The same compression is what makes a deck of cards memorable in seconds rather than minutes. The IAM Speed Cards record, a shuffled deck committed to memory by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh of Mongolia in 2018, stands at 12.74 seconds, and it was set with PAO. That record belongs to a different list, the 52-row card version, and the two should not be mixed. But the arithmetic is the same, and so is the drilling.

Adopt this list, or build your own

Received wisdom says the list must be yours, because your own people are more vivid than a stranger's. There is something to that, and it is not the whole story. A list you never finished is worth nothing, and the choosing is the part that stalls people, because deciding between two equally good names for 67 is more tiring than learning either.

The honest advice is a hybrid. Take this list as the default, drill it, and let the drill tell you which rows to replace. A row you miss three times in a week is a row where your own person will do better, and by then you will know exactly what is wrong with the one you are replacing, which is far easier than choosing from nothing. Expect the swapping to be front-loaded: a run of replacements early, then almost none.

Testing a row before you keep it

A row is not finished when you have written it down. It is finished when it passes three checks, and they take about a minute each.

Say the three legs in under a second. Cover the table, look at the number, and produce Person, Action and Object aloud, in order. If you have to deliberate, the row is a draft. This is the test the whole list is eventually graded on.

Compose it with two strangers. Pick two other rows at random and build the composite: your Person, their Action, their Object. If the image refuses to form (because the Object can be neither held nor worn, or the Action is something you cannot picture a body doing), the row will fail in use even though it passed on its own. Objects should be graspable or wearable. Actions should have motion in them.

Retrieve it cold tomorrow. Build it today, test it ten minutes later to catch the weak pictures, then leave it alone until tomorrow and retrieve it before you look at anything. Whatever survives the night is real. A row that only works while it is warm has not been learned, it has been noticed.

The rule every name follows

Every person in the table encodes their own number, using the consonant sounds of the Major System.

The rule is this: the first two consonant sounds of the name as spoken, in that order, are the two digits. Vowels are free. So are w, h and y, and so is any letter that is not pronounced. A doubled letter counts once. The "ck" in a name is a single k sound. An "x" is k plus s, so it fills both slots on its own.

Four worked examples, which are worth saying aloud rather than reading. 42 is R then N, which is Ronaldo: R, N, L, D, and the first two are the ones that count. 15 is T then L, which is Tolkien: T, L, K. 00 is S then S, which is Sisyphus: S, S, F. And 31 is M then T, which is Mother Teresa, because the "th" in Mother is the 1 and the M is the 3.

Note what the rule does not do. It does not encode the Action or the Object, which are free choices tied to what the person is known for; only the name carries the digits. That is deliberate, because it means a swapped Object costs you nothing, while a swapped Person costs you the address. If you want to replace an Object, the Major peg word for that number is a ready-made substitute that already encodes the same two digits, and every number has one on the 00-99 peg chart.

Two more rules bind anything you write yourself, and neither is about sounds. Every Action must be unique across the hundred, because two people who both "throw" make 2143 and 2145 collide. And every Object must be unique too, for the same reason. The Person, the Action and the Object each have to identify one row and one row only, which is why the table below has no repeats in any column, and why no two Objects in it share a head noun either: two masks separated by an adjective are a collision waiting for a tired reader. Watch the near misses as well as the exact ones, because shredding and riffing are the same verb at two in the morning.

Invented people work as well as real ones, which is why the table mixes them: a row needs a face that arrives instantly, not a face that existed. And when a row does need replacing, do not sit waiting for a name to arrive. Pick a category you know cold, footballers, cartoons, Greek myth, saints, and run the two sounds through it until something with a face comes out. A category hands you ten candidates where a blank page hands you none.

The list: 00 to 99

The Sounds column is the check: it holds the two consonant sounds the Person's name actually starts with, so every row proves its own number without your scrolling back up. A soft g is written j because that is the sound it makes; a hard g stays g and counts as a 7.

Rows that need saying aloud

Some names only give up their digits as sounds, and the Sounds column is where to look when a row surprises you. Titian is TISH-un, so t then sh. Nietzsche is NEE-cha and Puccini is poo-CHEE-nee, both n or p then ch. Gigi is JEE-jee, two sixes. Chopin opens on a sh, not a ch. The g in Gutenberg, Galileo and Figaro is the hard one, a 7 and not the 6 a soft g would give. Doc Holliday is d then k, both sounds out of the nickname, and Da Vinci is d then v with Leonardo left out: a row takes the first two sounds of the name as it stands in the table, which is not always a birth name. Mbappé keeps its sounded m, and Mulan is filed under the Disney form of the name, Fa Mulan, so that the f leads. Elmo, Elvis, Elijah and Albus all begin with a vowel that costs nothing, leaving l first and m, v, j and b second. And Malcolm X ends in an x that would be k plus s if it fell in the first two slots, which it does not.

A worked example: six digits

Take the first six digits of pi, 314159. Pairs: 31, 41, 59.

Row 31 is Mother Teresa, and the first pair gives the Person. Row 41 is Ridley Scott, and the second pair gives his Action, directing. Row 59 is Albus Dumbledore, and the third pair gives his Object, a long wand. Compose them in that order and you get Mother Teresa directing, with a long wand for a baton. One image, six digits. Put it on the first place in your route and move on.

Notice what the composition throws away. You never touch Mother Teresa's own Action or Object, you never touch Ridley Scott's Person, and you never touch Dumbledore's Action. Each row contributes exactly one leg, determined by its position in the group of three, and that is what keeps 314159 from decoding the same way as 594131.

Twelve digits, two images

Extend it to 314159265358, the first twelve digits of pi. Pairs: 31, 41, 59, then 26, 53, 58.

The first image is the one above. For the second, row 26 is Nietzsche, who supplies the Person; row 53 is Elmo, who supplies the Action, giggling; row 58 is Elvis, who supplies the Object, a rhinestone jumpsuit. Nietzsche giggling inside a rhinestone jumpsuit.

Digits do not always arrive in sixes, and the rule is to leave the last group short rather than pad it. Four digits give a Person and an Action with nothing in their hands, so the year 1997 is row 19's Tupac doing row 97's Action, moulding, empty-handed; two digits give a Person standing alone. Both read cleanly on the way back, because a missing leg is missing visibly. Padding a short group up to six with a filler row is the one thing to avoid: on recall nothing tells you the filler Object was never a digit.

Two images, twelve digits, two places. Set them down in order along a route you know, say the front door and the hall table, and walk back through afterwards to check. On recall you meet Mother Teresa first, read her Person as 31, read the Action she is doing as Ridley Scott's 41, read the Object as Dumbledore's 59, and write 314159 before moving to the hall table. The whole skill is that the reading runs backwards as cleanly as the building ran forwards, which is exactly what the drilling buys.

The first week

Twenty rows a day, five days, then two days of testing. That build rate is Dominic O'Brien's: he suggests ten to twenty numbers a day while assigning a character to every number from 00 to 99, and twenty a day is the brisk end of it. This is the schedule the rest of this site uses, and the gaps in it are doing as much work as the sessions.

Day 0. Build 00 to 19. Say each name aloud, check the two sounds against the number, and picture the Action and the Object once. Within the hour, cover the table and recall all twenty from the numbers alone, cycling until each row has come up correctly three times. Rebuild on the spot any picture that would not come. That is building, not reviewing, and it is the day's only work.

Day 1. Before looking at anything, recall 00 to 19 cold. That is your first spaced review, and it is the one that matters most. Then build 20 to 39 the same way.

Days 2 to 4. One new block a day: 40 to 59, 60 to 79, 80 to 99. Start each session by recalling the block you built the day before, cold, before you open the table.

Day 5. No new rows. Run the whole hundred forwards, then twenty numbers pulled at random, then the reverse test: name to number, which is harder and is the direction you will need on recall.

Day 6. Composition only. Take random six-digit strings and build the composite image for each without looking anything up. If you can do a string in under ten seconds, the list is working; if you stall, note which row stalled you, because that is the row to rebuild.

From there the schedule stretches, and it is the one the spaced-repetition guide sets out: a second review about a week after Day 0, a third around three weeks, then hand the whole thing to a drill and let each row keep its own calendar. The reason "tomorrow" is the right first gap is not folklore: when Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros replicated Ebbinghaus in 2015 they found the curve is not smooth, and savings in their own replication came out higher at one day than at nine hours, a jump they say current sleep-and-memory research would predict but that remains to be established for this kind of experiment. Whatever causes it, testing after the night beats testing before it.

The honest limits

A hundred rows is a month, not a weekend. The week above gets you to recognition. Getting to the sub-second, no-deliberation recall that makes PAO faster than plain pegs takes weeks more of daily drilling, and there is no version of this where you skip that and keep the compression.

The list runs one way at first. Number to person comes quickly; person to number lags well behind, and person to number is what recall needs. Drill the reverse direction deliberately or it will not arrive.

Order errors are the characteristic failure. Most mnemonic failure is forgetting. PAO fails by remembering the right three things in the wrong slots, which produces a confident wrong answer. The only fix is the rigid composition order, drilled until deviating from it feels wrong.

Borrowed people are weaker than your own. If half this table is strangers to you, half of it will be slow, and drilling only narrows the gap.

It is a storage system, not an understanding system. A PAO list will hold a phone number, a card order, a hundred digits of pi or a long sequence of dates. It will not help you follow an argument or solve a problem, and a guide that implies otherwise is selling something.

The card list is a different list. The 52-row card PAO shares the technique but not the rows, and mixing the two is the fastest way to corrupt both. Learn one, get it cold, then learn the other.

Taking the list with you

The table is meant to leave this page. The browser's own print dialogue turns it into a PDF, but the version that earns its keep is a deck you can drill.

Copy the table into a spreadsheet and cut it to two columns: the number, and that row's Person, Action and Object run together in one cell, so 31 sits beside Mother Teresa, bandaging, a blue-bordered sari. Save it as a .csv or .tsv with a header row of front,back and upload it at the import page, which takes .csv, .tsv and Anki .apkg files and names the deck after the file.

Because every front is a whole number between 0 and 99, the importer notices a pegset and offers to link each row to its own peg entry. Leave that ticked. It is what makes the result a numbers deck rather than a pile of flashcards, and a numbers deck appears in the deck row of the drill below, where your own row prints beside each pair in place of the Major peg word. Untick it and you get a flip-card deck for the custom drill instead; swap the two columns before you save and that deck runs the reverse direction, name to number, which is the direction this list is worst at.

Where to drill it

For digits, the numbers drill is the closest thing here to the test this list is for, with one adjustment. Set it to two digits, then reach for the prompt-count slider rather than the difficulty presets: the slider runs from ten pairs to a hundred in tens, so thirty, sixty or ninety pairs divide evenly into three-row composites with nothing left over. The presets do not. The shortest of them is five pairs, which is one composite and two pairs spare, and the two above it are twenty and forty.

The drill reveals one pair at a time against a clock you set anywhere between fifteen and a hundred and eighty seconds, and it prints a peg word beside each pair: the Major word if you drill the system pool, your own row if you imported the list. Hold three pairs, compose, place. Recall is a single box: you type the whole digit string back and it scores you pair by pair, which is exactly the reverse reading this list has to survive.

For the card version, the PAO deck journey walks you through the 52-row list stage by stage, from the four suits to a timed full-deck attempt, and the deck guide covers what a realistic first-deck time looks like.

The Major set below is the same sounds and the same hundred numbers, and every peg on it doubles as a spare Object for any row in the table above that you decide to replace. Adopt it whether or not you build the PAO list on top of it.

Print it, import it, or leave the tab open. What matters is that the hundred rows stop being a list you consult and start being a hundred people you know, in the way you know which of your friends is always late. At that point six digits really do arrive as one picture, and the list has paid for itself.