Verbal memory test

This is a recognition task: you don't have to recall the words, only decide whether a word has come up before. It sounds easy at first, but gets harder as the pile of seen words grows. Roughly 45% of the time the game brings back an earlier word, otherwise it shows a fresh one, and you need to tell them apart quickly and confidently.

You have three lives. Every correct decision scores a point and every mistake costs a life. Calling a seen word “new” is a miss, and calling a new word “seen” is a false alarm – both count. At the end the game lists the words you got wrong and in which direction, which tells you a lot about your own error pattern.

The words come from the common-but-not-trivial part of the vocabulary (roughly the 150th to the 5,000th most frequent word), so recognition doesn't hinge on a word being rare or odd.

The word list is our own build, based on word frequencies in public-domain fiction from Project Gutenberg. The English list draws on novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott and others; the Hungarian list on Ferenc Molnár, Géza Gárdonyi, Zsigmond Móricz, Kálmán Mikszáth and others. Every author died more than seventy years ago, so the texts are free to use.

We filtered the list: proper names, archaic spellings, one-letter words and offensive or sensitive terms are out, and a word only made it in if it appears in books by at least four different authors. Because the sources are classic novels, a few old-fashioned words remain – they don't make the game harder; unusual words are actually easier to remember.

The same word lists power the 200, 1,000 and 5,000-word levels of our typing speed test.

There's no reliable public population norm for this exact task, so we don't show a percentile. Recognition memory is studied with many different procedures, but their list lengths, pacing and word sets differ from ours, and inventing a number would be misleading.

As a rough guide from experience: the first 20–30 words feel easy for most people, the difficulty kicks in around 40–60 points, when so many words are “in there” that familiar and new start to blur, and scores above 100 take excellent focus and a good strategy.

Track your progress on your own leaderboard, kept separately for each language. Try a few runs at a similar time of day in the same language – that way you'll know whether an improvement is real or just a good day.

• Picture the word: a quick, vivid image (“well” – a stone well with a bucket) leaves a far stronger trace than the letters alone.
• Link words up: when two words are related (rain, cloud), tie them into a tiny story.
• Beware “sort of familiar”: if a word feels vaguely familiar but you can't place it in this game, it's often familiar from everyday life, not from the run. That kind of false alarm is the most common mistake.
• Keep a steady pace: there's no time limit, but crawling along is tiring. A calm, even rhythm works best.
• Use the keyboard: with S and N (or the arrow keys), your hands stay put and your attention stays on the word.

Memory research separates two basic task types. In recall you have to produce the information from scratch (“list the groceries”); in recognition it's in front of you and you only decide whether you've met it before (“was this on the list?”). Recognition is almost always easier, which is why you can handle many words before mistakes start. The catch is that familiarity is deceptive: a common word you hear every day can feel familiar even if it hasn't appeared in the game. If most of your errors are false alarms, be stricter – only press “Seen” when you can actually place the word in this run.

The test runs entirely in your browser. Your leaderboard and history are stored locally. The Share result link button gives you a link that shows a preview image with your score; it only contains the score and the language, nothing personal.

This is a fun self-check, not a medical or psychological assessment. If you're worried about changes in your memory, talk to a doctor.

More memory games: the number memory test, the sequence memory test, the chimp test, plus a visual memory game on the memory test hub.