The Peg System

The link method gives you a list in order. It does not give you a list by position. Ask someone who has chained twenty words to tell you the fourteenth and you will watch them count on their fingers from the apple. For most everyday lists that is fine. For anything you need to jump into (the seventh point of a speech, the fourth item on an agenda, the ninth amendment) it is not.

The peg system solves this with an idea so simple it is easy to underrate. You memorise, once and permanently, a set of images that stand for the numbers one to ten (or twenty, or a hundred). Those are your pegs. From then on, to remember any list, you hang each item on its numbered peg by making the two images interact. Position four is always the same picture, so "what was fourth?" has an instant answer: look at peg four and see what is stuck to it.

This article covers the three peg lists a beginner should know, how to use them, where they run out, and what to do when they do.

Rhyme pegs: one is a bun

The most widely taught peg list rhymes each number with a noun. The version below has been circulating in roughly this form since the nineteenth century; the exact words vary from book to book and it does not matter which you use, as long as you fix one and stop changing it.

Rhyme pegs are fast to learn because the rhyme does the retrieval for you: "four" summons "door" before you have finished thinking. That same feature is their limit. Rhymes run out at ten or so; the extensions people propose for eleven to twenty (eleven is "penny heaven", twelve is "delve", and so on) are strained and slow. Use rhyme pegs for ten-item lists and do not try to stretch them.

Shape pegs: the number looks like a thing

The second list turns each digit's shape into an object. This is the oldest form of the idea; a version of it appears in a seventeenth century English mnemonic manual, and every child who has drawn a swan from a 2 has rediscovered it.

Shape pegs have one advantage over rhymes: they are visual from the start, so you never have to convert a sound into a picture. Many people find them easier to use, if slightly slower to learn. They have the same ceiling. Beyond ten, you are inventing shapes for "17" and it stops being obvious.

Pick rhymes or shapes, not both. Two peg lists for the same numbers means two candidates for every position and a coin-toss at recall.

Alphabet pegs: twenty-six for free

If you need more than ten positions and are not ready for the Major System, the alphabet gives you twenty-six pegs with almost no learning, because you already know the order. Each letter becomes a noun that starts with that letter's sound: A is ape, B is bee, C is sea, D is deer, E is eel, F is effigy (or just "F" as a flag), G is jeans, H is age (a wrinkled old man), I is eye, J is jay, K is cake, and so on. The sound-alike ones (C as sea, I as eye, J as jay, U as ewe, Y as wire) are the strongest, because the letter name is the picture.

Alphabet pegs are underrated. They give you twenty-six fixed hooks, they are useful for anything already alphabetical (a glossary, a list of countries), and they are a natural second peg list to hold alongside a numbered one without collision, because "M" and "13" do not compete.

How to hang an item on a peg

The mechanic is the join from the link method, applied to a fixed partner. Suppose you have a ten-point talk to give and the fourth point is about budget cuts. Peg four is a door. You do not picture "budget cuts near a door." You picture the red door being sawn in half, and a pile of banknotes falling out of the cut, and the brass knocker rattling. Make the door do something to the item or the item do something to the door.

Three rules from the link method carry over unchanged.

Interaction, not proximity. The peg and the item must act on each other. Side-by-side images collapse within the hour.

One concrete picture per item. "Budget cuts" is abstract, so you substitute: a pile of cash, a pair of scissors. Whatever you choose, commit to it.

Specific beats strange. A door with a particular colour and a knocker you can hear will outlast a door that is merely weird.

Then test yourself in a random order, not from one to ten. Ask "what was seven?" and "what was three?" and "what was nine?" If you can only answer by starting from one, you have built a chain, not pegs, and you need to make the peg images stronger.

A worked example

Here are ten items, the kind of thing you might need in a random-access way: the first ten elements of the periodic table.

1. hydrogen (peg: bun). A bun inflates like a balloon and floats

away, because hydrogen is the lightest gas.

1. helium (peg: shoe). You inhale from a shoe and your voice goes

squeaky.

1. lithium (peg: tree). A tree with a phone battery for a trunk,

sparking.

1. beryllium (peg: door). A door made of emerald (beryl is the

mineral behind emeralds), heavy and green.

1. boron (peg: hive). A hive that someone is boring into with a

drill; the bees are furious.

1. carbon (peg: sticks). A bundle of charcoal sticks, black dust on

your hands.

1. nitrogen (peg: heaven). The gate in the cloud is frozen; a tank of

liquid nitrogen is smoking beside it.

1. oxygen (peg: gate). A gate with a diver's oxygen tank chained to it,

hissing.

1. fluorine (peg: wine). A bottle of wine labelled toothpaste;

fluoride, the taste of mint where there should be grapes.

1. neon (peg: hen). A hen glowing pink and buzzing, a neon sign in the

shape of a bird.

Now ask yourself for number six. Sticks. Charcoal. Carbon. The answer arrives without a tour of the first five. That is the whole point of pegs, and the reason they belong in your kit alongside the link method rather than instead of it.

Reusing pegs without collisions

The obvious worry: if peg four is always a door, and you use it for your talk on Monday and your shopping on Tuesday, will Monday's banknotes not fall out of Tuesday's door?

In practice, less than you would expect. The most recent image is the strongest, and the older one fades quickly unless you revisit it. Experiments on multi-list peg learning found that subjects could use the same pegs for several lists in a row with modest interference, provided the lists were learned at different times. For everyday use, one peg list serves indefinitely.

If you need two lists alive at the same time (a speech you are rehearsing and a set of errands), use two peg lists: rhymes for one, the alphabet for the other. And for anything you want to keep for months, pegs are the wrong tool; that is a job for a memory palace, where each list gets its own building.

Where pegs run out

Ten is the honest ceiling for rhyme and shape pegs, and twenty-six for the alphabet. Beyond that, extending the same idea means inventing a new picture for every number, with nothing to help you retrieve it. Several nineteenth and twentieth century authors published lists of a hundred pegs built by brute force, and their readers mostly did not learn them, because learning a hundred arbitrary pairings is exactly the kind of task mnemonics exist to avoid.

The solution that memory sport settled on is to derive the peg from the number by a rule, so that the peg is reconstructible rather than memorised. That rule is the Major System: each digit maps to a consonant sound (1 is t, 2 is n, 3 is m, and so on), and a peg word for 42 is any word whose consonants are R then N: rain. You do not memorise a hundred pairs. You learn ten sounds and then the peg word for any number can be worked out, checked, and eventually recognised on sight.

The Major System chart on this site lists a peg word for every number from 00 to 99, each with its consonant encoding shown, and the full guide explains the ten sounds and how to choose your own words. If you have used rhyme pegs for a fortnight and found yourself wanting more than ten, that is the moment to move.

Pegs for things that are not lists

Two uses of pegs that beginners often miss.

Dates and numbers inside other facts. A peg is a picture for a number, so anywhere a number appears you can peg it. The year a treaty was signed, a street address, the page a quotation is on. With rhyme pegs you are limited to single digits, which is why this use really only opens up with the Major System, where 1815 becomes a two-word image (for instance "tough tail", T-F for 18 and T-L for 15) and can be linked to the battle it dates.

Fixed routines. A checklist you run every time (packing for a trip, closing up a shop, a pre-flight sequence) is a list you need by position and want to keep. Peg it once. Because the pegs are permanent and the list is stable, the images do not need to be refreshed and become a routine you can run in your head while doing something else with your hands.

Pegs for studying

Students are the group who get the most from pegs and use them least, usually because nobody told them the trick of putting a chain on a peg. A peg holds one image, but that image can be the first link of a link-method chain, so a single peg can carry a whole sub-list.

Take an essay question with four causes of a war, each of which has three supporting facts. Peg the four causes to pegs one to four. Then, from each cause-image, chain its three facts. At recall you go to peg two (a shoe), see the cause you attached to it, and follow the chain off it for the three facts. Four pegs, twelve facts, random access to the causes and ordered access to the details. This is the structure of most exam answers and it is the structure pegs and chains give you for free.

The same layout suits anatomy (peg the regions, chain the structures in each), law (peg the elements of an offence, chain the cases), languages (peg the tenses, chain the endings) and any syllabus that comes as a numbered list of headings with details underneath.

A practical warning: do not peg what you have not understood. A peg will faithfully return a fact you never grasped, and you will write it down in the exam without being able to use it. Understand first, then peg what needs to be retrievable in order.

Teaching pegs to children

Rhyme pegs are the mnemonic most people meet first, usually in primary school, and they are the right choice for a child for the same reasons they are the right first choice for an adult: no setup, instant retrieval, and a built-in game. A child who can chant "one is a bun, two is a shoe" can peg the planets in an afternoon, and will remember them long after the chant is forgotten, which is a small, real demonstration that memory is a skill rather than a talent.

Two adjustments help. Let the child draw the pegs and the joined images rather than merely imagine them; the drawing is the encoding. And test out of order from the very beginning ("what was number six?"), because children, like adults, will otherwise build a chain and call it pegs.

A four-day plan

Day one. Learn one peg list to the point where any number produces its picture instantly, in random order. Rhymes take most people under ten minutes. Then peg a ten-item list of your own and test it out of order.

Day two. Recall yesterday's list before looking. Then re-peg a new list onto the same pegs and notice how much of yesterday's list survives (usually some, rarely all, and it does not matter).

Day three. Learn the alphabet pegs, A to M at least. Peg a thirteen-item list.

Day four. Open the Major System chart and learn the ten digit sounds, not the words. Work out for yourself why the peg for 31 is a mat and for 13 is a tomb. When that reasoning is obvious, you have outgrown this article, and the numbers practice will drill the chart into you a decade at a time.

What the peg system is for, in one paragraph

Pegs are a numbered shelf. They are cheap to build, they give you random access, they are reusable, and they run out quickly. Use them for short lists you need by position, learn them in an afternoon, and treat them as the on-ramp to the Major System rather than a destination. Everything you learn here about hanging a picture on a fixed hook is exactly what you will do with a hundred Major pegs, and then with the rooms of a palace.