The evidence question
Why Do Some English Words Feel Easier to Remember Than Others?
Why some English words stick after a few encounters while others keep slipping away: concreteness, imagery, emotion, cognates, word form, and semantic richness.
A question worth asking.
10 sources, open to exploreIn this article 14 sections
You meet two English words several times.
One seems to stick almost immediately. You can picture it, recognize it, and pull it back a day later.
The other keeps behaving like a stranger.
It is tempting to explain the difference with one number: maybe you simply saw the first word more often. Frequency matters enormously across vocabulary. But even when exposure is similar, words are not equivalent memory objects. Some arrive with an image, an emotional reaction, a familiar-looking form, a translation that already resembles them, or a dense network of meanings and associations.
So why are some words easier to build into memory than others?
Because a word can give memory more than one useful route into the same representation.
Concrete and imageable words often have an advantage over abstract words. Emotion can make some words more distinctive. Cognates can borrow support from a language you already know. Familiar spelling and sound patterns can make a new form easier to encode. Words with richer semantic structure can also be processed more efficiently in some tasks.
But none of these is a universal "memorability score." Their effects depend on the learner, language pair, task, and kind of memory being tested. A word can be easy to recognize yet difficult to produce, easy to understand yet difficult to spell, or memorable in one context without being broadly usable.
That makes this a different problem from why a word you already know can suddenly become inaccessible. There, the memory exists but retrieval fails. Here, the question starts earlier: what makes some lexical representations easier to establish in the first place?
Frequency is powerful, but it is not the whole story
Frequent words tend to be processed faster and learned earlier because learners receive more opportunities to encounter, interpret, and retrieve them.
But "same frequency" is not the same as "same learning history."
Two words with similar corpus frequency can differ in where you encounter them, how many contexts they appear in, whether you already know a related word, how distinctive their meaning feels, and whether their spelling and sound fit patterns your brain already knows.
Even within a controlled learning experiment, word characteristics can change how quickly a novel form becomes recognizable or producible. One study of novel written words found that English-like forms such as nish were recognized and produced more accurately than forms with less familiar orthographic patterns such as gofp. Bartolotti & Marian, 2017
A particularly relevant foreign-language study manipulated concreteness, cognate status, and frequency directly. Cognates and concrete items were easier to learn and less susceptible to forgetting, while frequency had little effect within that controlled training task. That does not make real-world frequency unimportant; it shows that item properties can matter even when exposure is experimentally managed. De Groot & Keijzer, 2000
The useful question is therefore not just How often did I see this?
It is What did this word have to attach to when I saw it?
Concrete words often arrive with an extra route
Compare ladder with justice.
Both can be known deeply. But ladder readily evokes a perceptual scene: shape, height, climbing, perhaps a particular ladder you have used. Justice depends more heavily on abstract relations, situations, and verbal explanation.
The long-established concreteness effect describes an advantage for concrete over abstract words in many memory tasks. Research has supported more than one possible mechanism. Concrete words may benefit from both verbal and imagery-related representations, while they may also activate richer or more accessible contextual information. Neuroimaging work on encoding concrete and abstract nouns has found patterns consistent with contributions from both verbal-context and imagery-related systems rather than a single exclusive explanation. Jessen et al., 2000
Recognition-memory experiments likewise report better memory for concrete than abstract words. Fliessbach et al., 2006
For a learner, the practical implication is not "abstract words are bad." It is that concrete words often come with cues that abstract words need you to build deliberately.
One word can give you a picture; another needs a situation
Suppose you are learning shatter — to break suddenly into many small pieces.
You can imagine a glass hitting the floor. You can hear the impact. You can picture the fragments.
Now take reluctance — unwillingness or hesitation.
There is no single canonical picture of reluctance. But you can create a situation:
You have agreed to speak at a meeting, but when your name is called, you pause at the door and wish someone else would go first.
The second word has become more concrete for this memory episode because you supplied a scene, action, and consequence.
In beginning L2 learners, research has found that still images can improve learning of concrete L2 words relative to L1 glosses under the tested conditions. That finding should not be generalized to every word type, but it shows how visual information can become a useful encoding route when the meaning supports it. Morett, 2019
Emotional words can become more distinctive — but emotion is not a cheat code
Words do not all feel emotionally neutral. Betrayal, funeral, kiss, and victory may recruit attention and associations differently from words such as folder or junction.
Laboratory studies have repeatedly found memory differences between emotional and neutral words. Doerksen and Shimamura found better free recall for emotionally valenced words than neutral words, although recognition memory did not show the same benefit. Doerksen & Shimamura, 2001
Kensinger and Corkin found more detailed memory for negative than neutral words and showed that both valence and arousal could contribute, with stronger effects for arousing material in their experiments. Kensinger & Corkin, 2003
The important detail is that the task matters. Research has also found an emotional-word memory advantage that depended on what participants attended to during encoding. Memory for emotional words, 2014
So "make every vocabulary item emotional" is not a serious learning rule. Emotion can increase distinctiveness or attention, but its effect is not identical across recall, recognition, learners, and encoding tasks.
Cognates can let a new word borrow an old route
Across many language pairs, cognates — words with overlapping form and meaning across languages — often receive a processing advantage.
This is not merely the feeling that a word "looks familiar." In Spanish-English bilingual children, cognates were named more successfully than matched noncognates even when stimuli were controlled for properties including frequency and length. The researchers interpreted the result as evidence that cross-language phonological similarity can support vocabulary learning. Sheng et al., 2016
Work with bilingual adults has also found faster naming for cognates, especially in the less dominant language. Costa, Caramazza & Sebastián-Gallés, 2000
That gives a cognate a head start: the new L2 form is not building every connection from zero.
But similarity can also mislead. A familiar-looking form does not guarantee identical meaning or usage, and cross-language effects vary with task and modality. Cognate status is an advantage to exploit, not permission to skip learning the word.
A word's shape can make it feel more or less learnable
Before a new word has a rich meaning, it is already a sequence of letters and sounds.
Some sequences fit patterns you know. Others feel awkward.
Research on novel-word learning shows that orthographic and phonological familiarity can influence acquisition. In the study comparing wordlike and less-wordlike novel forms, forms that better matched familiar English sublexical patterns were learned more accurately. Bartolotti & Marian, 2017
For an English learner, the relevant patterns depend partly on previous language experience. A cluster that is ordinary in English may be unusual in your first language; a spelling pattern that looks transparent to one learner may create competition for another.
This also explains why raw word length is a poor standalone explanation. A longer word can contain familiar pieces — a known root, prefix, suffix, or recognizable sound pattern — while a shorter word can be unusually confusable.
Unfamiliar is not always harder because it is long. It may be harder because memory has fewer familiar chunks to reuse.
Semantic richness gives a word more neighbors to connect with
Meaning is not a single dictionary line.
A word can activate features, sensory information, associations, categories, contexts, and other related concepts. Researchers use semantic richness as an umbrella for several properties that capture how much semantic information a word activates.
A large spoken-word study found that concreteness, emotional valence, and number of semantic features each explained unique variation in response times: words that were more concrete, emotionally valenced, or associated with more semantic features were processed faster in lexical-decision and semantic-categorization tasks. Other richness measures in that study did not show the same effect. Goh et al., 2016
That nuance matters. "More associations = always better memory" would be too simple.
But it gives a useful learning model: a word with only one thin translation may have fewer routes available than a word connected to examples, contrasts, categories, sensory features, collocations, and personal contexts.
This is also why recognizing a word is not the same as being able to recall and use it. Rich knowledge can support several different retrieval routes rather than one cue-answer pair.
Two equally frequent words can still give memory very different material
| Property | Word with more support | Word with less support | Possible memory consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Concreteness | Easy to perceive or imagine | Highly abstract | More readily available sensory/imagery cues |
| Emotional value | Personally or affectively salient | Emotionally neutral | Greater distinctiveness in some tasks |
| Cross-language overlap | Familiar cognate form | No useful L1 overlap | Existing form/meaning connections may help |
| Word form | Familiar sound/spelling chunks | Unusual or confusable pattern | Easier initial encoding of the form |
| Semantic richness | Many features and associations | Thin isolated definition | More potential routes into meaning |
| Personal context | Connected to a real event or goal | Encountered only as an item | More distinctive retrieval cues |
The table describes possible supports, not a hierarchy of universally easy and hard words.
Do not turn these effects into a formula for "easy words"
It would be convenient to assign points: concrete + cognate + emotional + short = easy.
Memory does not work that cleanly.
These variables can correlate with one another. Their effects change with the task. Recognition and free recall are different. Learning a spelling and learning a meaning are different. A cognate advantage depends on the languages involved. Emotional memory can depend on attention and arousal. Semantic richness itself has multiple definitions.
And the learner matters.
Football may be semantically rich for someone who follows the sport every weekend and comparatively thin for someone who never watches it. Mortgage may become instantly memorable the week you apply for one. Personal relevance can change the effective network surrounding a word even though the dictionary entry has not changed.
The scientific findings are therefore better used as mechanisms than as a memorability calculator.
Myth: difficult words just need more repetitions
Myth: If one word takes ten encounters while another takes three, the only difference is exposure count.
Reality: Repetition matters, but each encounter interacts with what the learner can already connect to the word. A concrete image, a familiar cognate, recognizable morphology, an emotional context, or a dense semantic network can change what is encoded during an encounter.
This does not mean you should stop repeating difficult words.
It means repetition becomes more useful when it adds routes instead of reproducing the exact same thin cue.
When a word refuses to stick, give it more hooks
- Make the meaning specific. Replace a vague translation with one clear sense you can explain.
- Add a scene if the word supports one. Picture an action, object, person, or situation rather than forcing imagery onto every abstract concept.
- Connect useful relatives. Add a contrast, collocation, category, or morphological relative — not a giant list of synonyms.
- Use cross-language similarity carefully. If a genuine cognate helps, use it as an anchor; still verify meaning and usage.
- Notice the form. Break an awkward spelling or pronunciation into familiar chunks.
- Retrieve from more than one direction. Meaning → word, sentence → word, sound → meaning, and eventually your own communicative context.
- Return after a delay. Extra hooks do not replace repeated retrieval over time.
This approach complements spaced retrieval and repeated encounters for vocabulary learning: spacing decides when memory has to reconstruct the word; richer encoding changes what it has available to reconstruct it with.
Some words stick because memory has more to grab
Vocabulary difficulty is not determined by frequency alone.
A word may be easier to establish because it evokes an image, carries emotional significance, overlaps with a word you already know, fits familiar sound and spelling patterns, or activates a richer network of meaning.
Those advantages are real, but conditional. No single property guarantees durable learning, and a word that feels easy in recognition may still fail in production.
The practical response to a stubborn word is therefore not simply repeat it harder.
Ask what is missing.
Does the meaning need a clearer scene? Does the form need attention? Is there a useful connection to a known word? Can you add a contrast, collocation, feature, or personal context? Then retrieve it later without the original cue.
The strongest words in memory are rarely just repeated strings. They are words with routes leading into them — and routes leading back out.
Sources and further reading
- De Groot & Keijzer (2000) — What Is Hard to Learn Is Easy to Forget: The Roles of Word Concreteness, Cognate Status, and Word Frequency in Foreign-Language Vocabulary Learning and Forgetting
- Jessen et al. (2000) — The concreteness effect: evidence for dual coding and context availability
- Fliessbach et al. (2006) — The effect of word concreteness on recognition memory
- Morett (2019) — The Power of an Image: Images, Not Glosses, Enhance Learning of Concrete L2 Words in Beginning Learners
- Doerksen & Shimamura (2001) — Source memory enhancement for emotional words
- Kensinger & Corkin (2003) — Memory enhancement for emotional words
- Sheng et al. (2016) — A robust demonstration of the cognate facilitation effect in first-language and second-language naming
- Costa, Caramazza & Sebastián-Gallés (2000) — The cognate facilitation effect: implications for models of lexical access
- Bartolotti & Marian (2017) — Orthographic Knowledge and Lexical Form Influence Vocabulary Learning
- Goh et al. (2016) — Semantic Richness Effects in Spoken Word Recognition