What are examples of mnemonic devices?
Common mnemonic devices include acronyms like ROY G. BIV for the colors of the rainbow, phrases like Every Good Boy Does Fine for the lines of the treble clef, rhymes like Thirty days hath September, and the memory palace, which places facts along a familiar route. Each one turns something hard to remember into a short, odd, easy cue.
A mnemonic is a memory aid: a cue that is easy to recall and carries a harder fact with it. The main types are acronyms, expression sentences where each word starts with the letter of an item, rhymes, and images or places. The glossary entry on mnemonics gives the definition. This page is the list.
The best ones are your own. A silly sentence you made up sticks better than a famous one you were handed, because making it forces you to work with the material. Use mnemonics for lists, orders and labels, not for ideas, which you need to understand rather than memorize.
A mnemonic gets a fact in, but you still have to pull it out again and again. Test yourself on the cue and the full list a day later, then three days later, then a week later.
| Type | Example | What it helps you remember |
|---|---|---|
| Acronym | ROY G. BIV | Rainbow colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet |
| Acronym | HOMES | The Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior |
| Expression | Every Good Boy Does Fine | Treble clef lines: E, G, B, D, F |
| Expression | My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos | The planets in order, Mercury to Neptune |
| Expression | Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally | Order of operations in the US: parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction |
| Rhyme | Thirty days hath September | How many days each month has |
| Word chunks | SOH CAH TOA | Sine, cosine and tangent in a right triangle |
| Expression | On Old Olympus' Towering Tops A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops | The 12 cranial nerves in order |
- 1Pick the list or fact you keep forgetting.
- 2Take the first letter of each item in the list.
- 3Turn the letters into a word or a sentence. The sillier, the better.
- 4Add a picture in your head of what the sentence says.
- 5Write the cue on a flashcard with the full list on the back.
- 6Test yourself after one day, three days and a week.