# What Is a Good Verbal Memory Score? — Get My Test Score > Is each word new, or have you seen it? What the test measures, why familiarity fools you, and how players on this site compare. Source: https://getmytestscore.co.uk/what-is-a-good-verbal-memory-score --- [Home](/) › [Guides](/guides) › What Is a Good Verbal Memory Score? # What Is a Good Verbal Memory Score? On the verbal memory test here, **30 words is a solid score, 50 is excellent and 80+ is exceptional**. The test shows one word at a time and asks whether you have _seen_ it earlier in this run or whether it is _new_; the run ends after three mistakes. It is a recognition memory task, and recognition is far easier than recall — most adults recognise hundreds of recently seen pictures with over 90% accuracy — so the score is limited less by storage than by the growing pile of similar-looking words that all start to feel familiar. Here is what the test measures and what the research says about verbal recognition. [Take the verbal memory test — free, no sign-up](/verbal-memory-test) ## What the verbal memory test measures Recognition memory has two ingredients: _recollection_, where you can bring back the moment you saw the word, and _familiarity_, a vaguer sense that it has come up before. Early in a run recollection does the work and you are almost never wrong. As the list grows, hundreds of words share letters, sounds and meanings, and familiarity from a similar word ("garden" after "gardener") produces false alarms. That is the mistake that ends most runs — saying "seen" to a new word — not forgetting a word you really did see. Psychologists call it the _false-memory_ or DRM effect, and it is a normal property of a well-organised memory rather than a fault. ## What counts as a good verbal memory score? Standard clinical word-list tests (the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, for instance) present 15 words five times and expect healthy adults to recall 10–13 and to recognise almost all of them among distractors. Continuous recognition tasks like this one are less standardised, so the bands are set from how players perform: 15 words is a typical first attempt, 30 is solid, 50 excellent, 80+ exceptional. Verbal memory peaks in the late twenties to mid-thirties, declines gently thereafter, and is one of the abilities most sensitive to sleep: recognition accuracy drops measurably after one short night. Vocabulary size helps because unfamiliar words are harder to encode; so does reading habitually. ## Why the run ends when it does Three "lives" is deliberate. One error is often a lapse of attention; three in a run of forty words means familiarity has started to outweigh recollection, and the test has found the edge of your reliable recognition. Players who reach 80+ almost all describe the same strategy: encoding each new word with something specific — an image, a rhyme, the last word it appeared near — so that later there is something to recollect rather than a feeling to trust. ## How to improve your verbal memory score - **Make each new word an image.** Even a fleeting picture gives recollection something to grab later. - **Say it, silently.** Pronouncing a word engages the phonological loop and deepens the trace. - **Link it to the previous word.** A running story of absurd pairings is the classic mnemonic and works well for 30–60 items. - **When it merely feels familiar, doubt it.** Most false alarms come from near-neighbours of words you did see. Ask "can I place it?" before saying "seen". - **Sleep first.** Verbal recognition is among the abilities most reduced by a short night. ## Score bands on the verbal memory test These are the bands the [verbal memory test](/verbal-memory-test) on this site uses for its result screen. | Score | Band | | --- | --- | | 80+ words remembered | Exceptional | | 50–79 words remembered | Excellent | | 30–49 words remembered | Solid | | 15–29 words remembered | Developing | | 0–14 words remembered | Warming Up | ## How players on this site compare Every completed [verbal memory test](/verbal-memory-test) adds an anonymous result to this site's histogram. This page shows the median and distribution once **20** results have been recorded (4 so far); until then the bands above are the guide. The live figures are always on the [benchmarks page](/benchmarks) and at `/api/data/norms`. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is a good verbal memory score? On this site’s continuous recognition test, 30 words is solid, 50 excellent and 80 or more exceptional. Clinical word-list tests expect healthy adults to recall 10–13 of 15 words after several presentations and to recognise nearly all of them. ### Why do I keep saying “seen” to new words? Because recognition partly relies on familiarity, and after dozens of words new ones that resemble earlier ones feel familiar too. Ask yourself whether you can place the word before answering “seen”. ### How can I improve verbal memory? Encode each word actively — picture it, pronounce it, link it to the previous word — and protect your sleep; verbal recognition is one of the first abilities that a short night reduces. ## Related guides - [What Is a Good Number Memory Score? Digit Span Explained](/what-is-a-good-number-memory-score) - [What Is a Good Visual Memory Score?](/what-is-a-good-visual-memory-score) - [Average Reading Speed: What Is a Good WPM?](/average-reading-speed) - [Benchmarks: how scores on this site are distributed](/benchmarks) - [All free tests](/free-tests) Site figures are anonymous results recorded on getmytestscore.co.uk and describe this site's players only; they are not clinical norms and should not be used for diagnosis. Research figures are cited from peer-reviewed sources and summarised in plain English. --- _Get My Test Score — see [/llms.txt](https://getmytestscore.co.uk/llms.txt) for the full site map and machine-readable endpoints._