At a glance

• Based on the reader question: Do you have any advice for how to remember the names of the players in my sports team?
• Acronyms and acrostics are coat hooks for memory: they compress long lists into one word or sentence, making them easier to store and retrieve.
• You can use AI as a drafting partner: first ask for any existing mnemonics, then have it generate and refine acronyms and acrostics tailored to your own lists.
• Good mnemonics work because they chunk information, stand out as slightly odd, demand a bit of effort to build, and quietly preserve the order of the original list.

Introduction

In this piece, I’ll share how I teach my students to take advantage of AI to create their own mnemonics, that is, devices for remembering things. Specifically, I want to focus on acronyms and acrostics.

Together, they form the oldest memory trick in the book for creating and recalling long lists of information. While they are powerful, creating them is tedious; with the AI workflow I teach, you’ll be able to take advantage of their power without the tedium, and create enduring mnemonics that make new lists of information unforgettable.

You don’t need to use AI. For millennia, human brains have done the trick. If you want to carry on this long tradition, just read the first few parts of this piece. If you want to dabble in the best of both worlds, read on.

What are acronyms and acrostics

Mnemonics are the memory equivalent of the coat hook I have by my front door. Without my coat hook, I would lose my keys. Without mnemonics, I would lose the hook I use to hang new information.

Acronyms

The first mnemonic device will sound familiar: a set of letters that represent the information you want to remember. For example, HOMES is a mnemonic for remembering the Great Lakes of North America: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.

Acrostics

The second is the word for a phrase whose initial letters refer to the initial letters of the information you want to remember.

Thinking back to music lessons, I can still recall the acrostic for remembering the notes on a treble clef, ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Football’ (E, G, B, D, F).

From the examples, you can see that acronyms and acrostics both do the same job: they give you a hook to hang new information.

And they’re extremely sturdy hooks. The acrostic for the notes on a treble clef is something I learned when I was eleven.

A workflow for making unforgettable lists of information

The simple workflow I teach my students to create their own acronyms and acrostics using an AI assistant is as follows:

1. Write up the list of information

Write down the list you want to remember. If it’s important, be sure to write the list in order.

A classic acrostic example is the planets in our solar system. In order, they are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

Knowing the chronology of historical events and names of historical figures is also valuable, so be sure to write these in order, too.

Also, slightly obvious, but acrostics are much better for ordered information than acronyms. They're more flexible.

2. Search for existing mnemonics

Before inventing something new, see if you can stand on someone else’s shoulders.

You might write the following to your preferred AI assistant:

Here is a list I want to remember: [insert your list].

The order [is/is not] important.

Are there any well-known acronyms or acrostics for this list?

If there is a good, established mnemonic, use it. In the world of learning, there are no prizes for originality.

For example, a well-known acrostic for the planets in our solar system as of 2006 is: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles.

3. Try acronyms first

If nothing useful shows up, ask for acronyms.

Using the first letters of each item, generate 10 acronyms that can be spoken as English words. Avoid anything rude or offensive.¹

Glance down the list. Discard anything that looks like a Wi-Fi password, and keep the few that resonate.

If nothing good comes up, switch to the more versatile option, acrostics.

4. Then try acrostics

Next, ask for sentences:

Taking the first letter of each item in this list, [and respecting the order of the list/disregarding the order of the list], generate 10 sentences where each word starts with the same first letter as the items in my list. The sentences should be playful, memorable, and not abstract.

Again, see which ones resonate with you.

For example, a mnemonic George Orwell remembered late into his middle age from his childhood was: ‘A [Big Nightingale] Was My Aunt; There’s Her House Behind The Barn.’²

The initial letters of this phrase are also the initials for the battles in the Wars of the Roses, a series of English civil wars fought in the 15th century.

Again, you're not hunting for genius. You’re just looking for a good enough hook that prevents you from having to use the inefficient approach of remembering the information through brute force.

5. Take your mnemonic on a test drive

Now, practice committing the mnemonic to memory:

• Hide your original list and the mnemonic
• Get a piece of paper and try to recall the mnemonic
• Next, try to rebuild the original list using the mnemonic
• Notice where you stall, refresh your memory, and try again

If you notice you keep stumbling on, for example, the fourth item, you might consider adjusting your mnemonic. If you can’t think of an easy way to do that, you can lean on your AI assistant.

This mnemonic works except I keep forgetting [the fourth item], which starts with [letter] and stands for [item].

Please rewrite the sentence so [the fourth word] is more striking. Include 5 different options for me to choose from.

Repeat your test drive with the new mnemonic until you can recall it smoothly.

Teaching yourself and others

These devices are not limited to your private revision notes. They are just as useful when getting other people to remember something you care about.

If you are teaching a group, running a training session, or launching a new project, an acronym or acrostic gives people a shared hook.

At Airbnb, we would often turn a set of principles into a short word. It was easier to hear someone say, ‘Are we following [ACRONYM] here?’ than to watch them fumble through an abstract slide deck in their head.

You can use the same trick when:

• You want a team to remember a few rules of best practice
• You are introducing a new process and don’t want it forgotten by Monday
• You need a polite way to bring people back to the point: ‘Does this fit our [WORD] framework?’

The method does not change. You collect the key ideas, strip them down to their initials, and build a hook that people will tell their grandchildren about.

Why they work

The science of learning has investigated acronyms and acrostics. Distilling their findings down, their effectiveness is grounded in four key elements that work with your brain:

• A laundry basket, not a laundry list: our short‑term memories are small. We can, without training, hold onto a few things at once, not a dozen. Turning a list into one word or a quirky sentence makes that information easier to carry. It becomes one unified thing, not lots of disparate things. I like to think of it as using a laundry basket to transport a fresh load of laundry rather than your hands.³
• Duck, duck, goose: our minds notice what is odd; what breaks the pattern. A plain list of names is forgettable. A slightly ridiculous sentence is not. The odd detail is what grabs you when everything else goes fuzzy. Tomato.⁴
• Effective effort: we’re more likely to remember things that take effort. Building a mnemonic forces you to pay attention, make choices, and test yourself. That deeper handling makes a memory more likely to stick.⁵
• Order is built-in: once you know what the letters stand for, you have the sequence for free. That’s one less thing to worry about.⁶

Pushing them to their limits:

Once you’re comfortable with short lists, you can aim higher. Let’s create a way of remembering the British monarchs from the Tudors (1485) to the present day.

The raw list covers 24 monarchs and over 500 years of history:

• Tudors (1485-1603): Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I
• Stuarts (1603-1714): James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II, William III & Mary II, Anne
• Hanoverians (1714-1901): George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV, Victoria
• Windsors (1901 - present): Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II, Charles III

Approaching this, I would keep the monarchs in their respective eras, and create mnemonics for each group, that is, one for the Tutors, one for the Stuarts, etc.

This technique of grouping information into manageable bites is called ‘chunking’.

The Tudors (1485-1603)

Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I.

Acrostic: Hungry Henry Eats More Lettuce.

Short, concrete, and it nods to Henry VIII’s love of food, which helps it stick.

While ‘Lettuce’ doesn’t start with an E, the L-sound is similar to ‘Lizabeth. It’s also a bit odd, which makes it more memorable.

The Stuarts (1603-1714)

James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II, William III and Mary II, Anne I.

For this list, note that it’s William and Mary, as they reigned together.

Acrostic: Jumpy Cats Chase Jittery Wet Mice Away.

The ‘wet mice’ visual gives me a mental nudge to recall the joint reign of William and Mary.

The Hanoverians (1714-1901)

The list we’re trying to remember is: George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV, Victoria.

Acrostic: Grumpy Great George Guards Woke Victoria.⁷

I thought the idea of Victoria being ‘woke’ was weird enough that I’d remember it.

The Windsors (1901-present)

The list we’re trying to remember is: Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II, Charles III.

Acrostic: Eager George Eats Grapes Every Christmas.

Fitting it all together

You can now note down the four chunks in a digestible format that’s way easier than remembering all the names with brute force:

• The Tudors (1485–1603) – Hungry Henry Eats More Lettuce
• The Stuarts (1603–1714) – Jumpy Cats Chase Jittery Wet Mice Away
• The Hanoverians (1714–1901) – Grumpy Great George Guards Woke Victoria
• The Windsors (1901–present) – Eager George Eats Grapes Every Christmas

Conclusion

Acronyms and acrostics are small tools, but they earn their keep. They turn ‘I once read that’ into ‘I can recall it when I need it'.

If this sort of thing interests you, I’ll be running a short memory series in my newsletter, Jamie’s Journal, where I’ll cover other practical methods for remembering complex pieces of information. You can sign up below.

In the existing portfolio, I recommend checking out the piece on Spaced Memory Repetition and the Feynman technique.

If you have a favourite mnemonic from school, work, or your own experiments, I'd love to hear about it. You can share it here.

1. I say avoid anything rude or offensive, but you can remove that. Like a pig in mud, our brains love remembering things that are rude and offensive, which is something I take full advantage of when creating my own private mnemonics. I recommend you do the same. ↩︎
2. Taken from ‘Such, such were the joys’ by George Orwell. I’ve replaced some of the language. The original language was common at the time, but pretty dang offensive today. ↩︎
3. Miller’s original ‘magical number seven’ paper argued that immediate memory is limited to a small number of chunks, and that recoding items into larger units is how we squeeze more through that bottleneck. Later work by Cowan suggests the true capacity is closer to four chunks, but the principle stands: grouped information behaves like one thing, not many. ↩︎
4. The effect has been known since von Restorff’s 1933 experiments on serial recall: an item that stands out from its neighbours is remembered better than the rest. Hunt’s re‑analysis makes the mechanism clear: distinct items attract more attention and are encoded in a more discriminable way. ↩︎
5. Craik and Lockhart’s 'levels of processing' framework, and Craik and Tulving’s later experiments, show that information handled at a deeper, semantic level is recalled far better than material processed shallowly. Building a mnemonic is an act of elaborative encoding: you are forced to think about meaning and make choices, which is why it lingers instead of passing straight through. ↩︎
6. In a 2019 procedural learning study, participants who learned an eight‑step task with the help of a mnemonic acronym not only remembered the steps better, but made fewer sequence errors and recovered more quickly after interruptions. The acronym changed how the task was represented in memory, effectively giving them a compact map of the order rather than a loose handful of actions. Dresler and colleagues’ imaging work points in the same direction more broadly: mnemonic training reshapes the underlying networks that support ordered recall. ↩︎
7. Rhymes are also great mnemonic devices. An alternative I invented when drafting this piece was: 'George Four/Will, Victori-or.' The modification of 'Victoria' forces a rhyme with 'Four' making it more memorable. ↩︎