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How to remember new words.

You don’t forget words because you are bad at remembering. You forget them because you met them once. Memory is built by retrieval, spacing and use, and all three are easy to build into a day.

By the Gloss team, PixelPaw · Published October 23, 2026 · Updated October 24, 2026 · How we check what we write

Forgetting has a shape

In the 1880s the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how quickly he forgot material he had just learned. Most of it went within a day; what was left faded slowly after that. Researchers since have found the same shape for most of what we learn. It is not a flaw in you. It is how memory works, and it tells you when to act.

Recall it, don’t reread it

Trying to remember a word (what did limerence mean again?) does more for memory than reading its definition one more time. Psychologists call this retrieval practice, or the testing effect. The small effort of pulling the word back is the part that strengthens it.

Space it out

Review a word just as it starts to fade: after a day, then a few days, then a week, then a month. Each successful recall pushes the next bit of forgetting further away, so the gaps can grow. This is spaced repetition. It is why the Gloss games bring a word back on the day you would have lost it, rather than every day.

Mix it up

Practicing several words and kinds of questions together feels harder than drilling one at a time, and that difficulty tends to pay off: recall is usually stronger later. Gloss’s four games, Recall, Speed match, Fill the blank and Which style, are mixed in one session for this reason.

Make it concrete

A word tied to a picture, a place or a feeling stays longer than a definition alone. Petrichor is easy to keep once you have stood in it; komorebi once you have walked under it. That is why every card starts with a sentence you can see.

Use it

Say the word, write it, explain it to someone. Producing a word builds a stronger memory than recognizing it on a page. One real sentence of your own is worth ten readings of someone else’s.

Sleep on it

Memories are consolidated during sleep, which is one reason a short review in the evening and another the next morning works so well. It is also a good reason not to cram.

Keep the habit small

Five minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday. One new word, three quick questions, a minute of practice: small enough to keep, which is the only habit that works. If you are building a vocabulary from scratch, how to improve your vocabulary covers the rest.

The studies behind this page

The forgetting curve is real and was replicated in 2015: a single subject learning 70 lists of nonsense syllables produced the same steep-then-flat curve Ebbinghaus drew in 1885, with a small bump at 24 hours that fits what sleep does for memory (Murre and Dros, PLOS ONE). The testing effect: students who took a test on a passage remembered substantially more a week later than students who reread it, even though rereading won five minutes after (Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science, 2006). The spacing effect: in 317 experiments, study spread out beat the same study in one sitting, and the best gap between reviews grew with how long the memory had to last (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer, Psychological Bulletin, 2006). And the role of context: learners who met a new word in ten sentences made sizeable gains across every kind of word knowledge, and the author thought full knowledge might take more than ten (Webb, Applied Linguistics, 2007). Why you forget a word right after you look it up walks through each one.

Keep reading

Why you forget a word right after you look it up · How to keep a word-of-the-day habit that lasts · SAT vocabulary: what the test actually asks, and 50 words worth knowing · All guides