Verbal Memory Test: Have You Seen This Word?

Press Start and a single word appears on the panel. Your only job is to decide whether that word has already come up in this run. If it has, press Seen. If it has not, press New. Then the next word appears, and the next, for as long as you still have lives left.

The first three words are always new. After that, roughly half of the turns bring back a word you have already seen, and the rest show a word that has not appeared yet. A repeat is never the same word twice in a row, so you cannot just compare each word with the one before it. A word that has come back once can come back again later, and it still counts as Seen.

You start with 3 lives, and every wrong answer costs one, whether you press New for a word you have seen or Seen for a word that is actually new. Your score is the number of correct answers, and speed does not count toward it. When your lives run out, the verbal memory test ends and shows your score next to your best result on this device. In the unlikely case that you get through every word in the list, the run ends there too.

Every correct answer adds one word to your score, whether you spotted a repeat or correctly called a word new. Because the pool of words you have seen keeps growing, the game gets harder the longer you play: early on you only track a handful of words, but after a few dozen turns a repeat can come from almost anywhere in the run.

Your result falls into one of five bands: 0 to 19 words, 20 to 39, 40 to 69, 70 to 99, and 100 or more. Each band describes what that kind of run looks like and gives you a tip for the next attempt. The bands are a guide to your own progress, not a ranking against other people, and there is no hidden pass mark.

A single run can end early for reasons that have little to do with memory, such as a misclick or a moment of distraction. Play a few runs in a row and look at your usual range. Your best score is saved in this browser, so you can see whether your verbal memory test results move over time.

This verbal memory test is a version of what psychologists call a continuous recognition task. Instead of studying a list and being quizzed on it later, you see a steady stream of items, some of them repeats, and judge each one as old or new on the spot. Researchers have used tasks like this since at least the 1960s, with words, numbers and pictures.

Recognizing is usually easier than recalling. Picking out a word you have seen is simpler than writing down every word from memory. In a well-known 1967 study, psychologist Roger Shepard found that people were remarkably good at recognizing words, sentences and pictures they had seen only once. Memory researchers also have names for the two errors you can make here: pressing Seen for a new word is a false alarm, and missing a repeat is simply called a miss.

Familiarity can fool you. Everyday words feel familiar because you meet them all the time, so the real question is only whether a word came up in this run. Studies of recognition memory have often found rare words easier to recognize than very common ones, partly for this reason. Each language on this site uses its own list of 300 common words, chosen for that language rather than translated.

Attention matters most. A word you barely glanced at is hard to recognize later, while one you read properly, and perhaps said to yourself, has a much better chance of sticking. Tiredness, background noise and checking your phone between turns all make it harder to tell a real repeat from a word that only feels familiar.

The words themselves play a part too. Vivid words that are easy to picture, like an animal or something you can hold, often stay with you longer than plain or abstract ones. Words that look or sound alike can trip you up, and so can a word you happened to read just before you started. Sleep, mood and time of day shift your score from one run to the next as well.

Read each word fully before you answer. Many early mistakes come from answering on a glance. Saying the word silently, or picturing it for a second, gives your memory more to hold on to. Repeats tend to feel different from new words; trust that feeling when it is clear, and look again when it is not.

Link words together. If you see “lantern” and later “river”, picture a lantern floating down a river. Odd, vivid images are easier to remember than isolated words, and your little mental story grows as the run goes on. When a word comes back, its image often comes back with it, which makes Seen an easier call.

Stay calm after a mistake. Losing a life tends to make people rush, and a rushed answer is often the next mistake. Take a breath and return to your steady rhythm. Practice usually helps while the game is still new, and your best score on this device lets you follow your progress. Getting better at this word memory game mostly means getting better at this particular task.

Your score can change a lot from one run to the next. A repeat that returns after a long gap is harder than one that comes back a few turns later, and the order of words is random every time, so no two runs are the same. Treat each attempt as a snapshot and watch your trend over several sessions.

This is a free word game for fun and self-tracking. It is not a medical, clinical, IQ or hiring test, and it is not the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test or any other assessment a psychologist might use. A low score here does not mean anything is wrong with your memory. If you or someone close to you is worried about memory changes, the right step is to talk to a doctor.