Word Memory: A Free Verbal Memory Test

How to play the verbal memory test

1. Tap Start. After a short countdown, Coach Mochi says Remember every word! and the first word appears in the middle of the screen.
2. Ask yourself one question: did this word already show up earlier in this run? If yes, tap Seen. If it’s the first time, tap New. The two big buttons sit side by side, within easy reach of your thumbs.
3. You start with three hearts. Each wrong answer costs one: calling a new word Seen, or calling a repeat New. The game tells you which it was (You saw that one! or That one was new!). A right answer adds a point and brings the next word.
4. On your last heart you’ll see Last life! When it’s gone, Out of lives! ends the set. Your score is the number of correct answers, and the result screen shows it next to your personal record.

Word Memory has a single mode, Test mode. There are no levels and no training ladder, so every run uses the same rules and your records stay comparable. The first three words are always new. After that, repeats start mixing in, and once you pass word 30 about half of what you see is a word you’ve already met. Every word is an everyday, concrete noun, something you could point at or picture, with no names of people or places.

What a verbal memory test measures

This is a recognition test for words. You never have to recall anything from scratch; you only judge whether a word is familiar from this run. The first dozen words feel easy. It gets hard for two reasons. Every answer adds another word to the pile you’re tracking, and ordinary words already feel a bit familiar before the game even starts. So the real work is keeping a clean record of what happened in the last minute or two while ignoring that false sense of “I know this one.” Psychologists call memory tied to a specific moment episodic memory, and this game works its verbal side.

Researchers use short online tasks like this one to study thinking skills at scale. A study of 48,537 people found that different abilities peak at different ages: processing speed around 18–19, short-term memory around 25, and vocabulary not until the late 60s or later (Hartshorne & Germine, 2015). That’s why Brainsquat keeps a separate record for each game instead of squeezing everything into one number about your head.

The honest limits:

• It measures how well you played this task today. Sleep, noise and mood all move the score.
• Practice raises your score on this game. A major review found strong evidence for that kind of improvement and little evidence that brain-game gains carry over to everyday tasks (Simons et al., 2016). We don’t claim more than that.
• It is not a medical test and can’t tell you anything about your health.

Averages and ranges

Human Benchmark runs a verbal memory test with the same rules (seen or new, three lives), and its public figures put the median at about 45 points. After each run, your result screen shows a coarse band based on that reference (like “Top 20–30% of players”), never a precise rank.

What your score means for you:

How to read it:

• Scores swing a lot. Some runs end inside the first 30 words, others go much longer. One run says less about you than your typical score over a week.
• It’s a reference, not a verdict. The reference data comes mostly from desktop players using English words, it’s self-selected, and it has no age information.
• Speed doesn’t count. Unlike Reaction Time, where phone touch and screen delay add milliseconds to every tap, Word Memory scores only correct answers, so your phone doesn’t put you at a disadvantage. A mis-tap still costs a heart.
• Your own number matters most. Watch your personal record and your usual score across five to seven runs.