The Major System: Better Remember Numbers by Converting Them Into Sounds and Words

This is hardly the latest of developments — indeed, it’s been kicking around for 300 or so years — but I recently learned about this handy mnemonic system from Jonathan Foer‘s excellent Moonwalking with Einstein and thought it might be of interest to Geekosystem readers. The human brain is generally better at recalling words and sounds than it is at recalling numbers, and the Major System cleverly exploits this quirk of evolution by converting numbers into consonant sounds, which can be used as building blocks to form longer words. Part of the trick of the system is that only consonant sounds are assigned to numeric values, and so you can string those consonants together with whatever vowel sounds make them easiest to remember.

For instance, under the system, the letter F can substitute for the number 8, R substitutes for 4, and and M substitutes for 3. If you’re trying to remember that a building is located at, say, 8434 Main Street, you can string these consonant sounds together to make the word “farmer” (8 -> F, 4 -> R, 3 ->M, 4 -> R), and then make the same conversion backwards to keep the number firmly in mind. Want to remember something at 8443 Main Street? Try using the word “forearm” to remember. (8 -> F, 4 -> R, 4 -> R, 3 ->M.) Since the vowels are whatever one wants them to be, there’s flexibility towards whatever is easiest to remember for the user of the system: Thus, “firmer,” “former,” and “forumer” all encode that same 8434 as “farmer”, and  “firearm,” “far rum,” and “furry ram” encode that same 8443 as “forearm.”

Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is the most commonly used set of consonant-number pairings, plus mnemonics to keep them associated in one’s mind:

It takes a little time to get the hang of, but it’s very useful and powerful once one gets a hang of the associations. There are crazy, Jedi-level things one can do with the Major System beyond this, most of which involve memorizing specific words to encode two-digit numbers, and stacking these to form longer numbers. But the beauty of the system is, as Foer observes, that it can be used right out of the box, making one’s day-to-day routine simpler in a relatively intuitive way. This nifty online tool will help you find Major System mnemonic words for more than 12,000 number chains.

(table via Wikipedia. h/t Moonwalking with Einstein.)