I talk a lot about memory and mnemonics on here, but where do you go to find specific mnemonics? In this post, I'll share some great (and free!) online resources where you can find mnemonics for just about anything!

Mnemonic Look-up Sites

These are great sites for established mnemonics:

• Amanda's Mnemonics Page (Backup link) – Alas, this once great site exists only in the web archive now, but the mnemonics still work!

• Forget Knot – There are fewer mnemonics on this site that many of the others, but it's still a good resource.

• Medical Mnemonics – Studying medicine? Here is the single best source for medical mnemonics, including the more obscure ones.

• Mnemonic Device.EU – This is an excellent site: cleanly designed, and the mnemonics are easy to get to, and even to submit.

• Mnemonic Devices – This site, which offers some mnemonics not common to many of the others, is also available in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish!

• Mnemonic Dictionary – This is a site focused exclusively on mnemonics for vocabulary words. The mnemonics are usually to help remember the meanings of the words, but you can also find the occasional spelling and usage mnemonics, as well.

• Mnemonics/Memoria Technica – Sure, it's an old-fashioned frame-based site, but it offers direct access to categories, and many of the mnemonics are illustrated, where needed.

• My Dear Aunt Sally – This site, whose name comes from a mnemonic for the order of mathematical operations, is set up as a search engine. It also enables you to easily add your own mnemonics.

• Project HappyChild Mnemonics – This is a small, but useful collection of the more common mnemonics.

• Think-a-Link – Think-a-Link is a social mnemonic site that allows you to submit your own mnemonics, as well as rate those of others!

• Wikipedia Mnemonics – As with all things Wikipedia, this is a growing collection of mnemonics, and a good place to look for some of the more obscure ones. It also has the unusual feature that the mnemonics themselves are listed, as opposed to what their subject matter.

Mnemonic Generators

Sometimes, there are no established mnemonics for what you want to remember (for example, this blog post). That's where these handy mnemonic-creation tools can come in handy:

• Chaucery Fun Mnemonic Generator – The generates mnemonics for 4-digit numbers only, mainly using the number of letters in a word as a reminder, such as “they fight american lobster” (4 letters, then 5 letters, then 8 letters, then 7 letters) for 4587. Sometimes, they use words like “nun” (none) or “not” (naught) for 0, and “solo” or “lone“ for 1.

• JogLab – Here's a great tool for automatically generating acrostic mnemonics with up to 14 letters (and more, if you break up the required letter sets. Here's a video that gives you the basic idea of JogLab:


• Mnemonicizer: The Mnemonic Device Device – NASA posted this simple and free tool to help people develop their own original acrostic mnemonics. It's more basic than JogLab (above), but still quite useful.

• PhoneSpell – Trying to remember someone's phone number? Put it in here, and see what, if anything your phone number spells!

• Rememberg – Like the Chaucery Fun Mnemonic Generator above, this one helps you remember numbers. Rememberg has two advantages though: It can handle more than just 4-digit numbers, and it generates the mnemonics in both the “count” system (again, like the Chaucery Fun Mnemonic Generator), and the Peg/Major System!

• Spacefem's Mnemonics Making Page – The simplest of the acrostic mnemonic generators in this post, it simply asks you to enter letters required, and then generate random, yet gramatically correct, sentences. For example, entering PiGuy yielded “Plaid Igloos Grow Ubiquitous Yolks”, “Pristine Islands Grab Unintelligent Yaks”, and many others.