Why Some Names Stick in Your Memory — Science Says It’s About How They Sound

Words do more than convey meaning — their sounds carry feeling, and those feelings can affect how well we remember them.

Sound, Beauty and Memory

New research published in PLOS One suggests that the aesthetic appeal of a word's sound influences its memorability. While psychologists have long known that positive emotions boost recall, this study isolates the role of phonetic appeal — the idea that some sound patterns simply feel more pleasing — and shows that those patterns make words easier to remember.

Phonaesthetics and the Bouba–Kiki Effect

The investigation falls under phonaesthetics, the study of how sound conveys expressive qualities. A classic demonstration is the Bouba–Kiki effect (first widely reported in the 1920s): when shown a rounded shape and a jagged shape, people around the world overwhelmingly label the round one "Bouba" and the spiky one "Kiki." Across studies, roughly 90% of participants make the same match, suggesting some phonemes carry cross‑cultural aesthetic cues.

Sound Hints at Meaning Across Languages

Other experiments show sound can hint at meaning even in unfamiliar languages. In one test, volunteers guessed which of two foreign words meant "near" and which meant "far" and were correct about two‑thirds of the time (for example, Japanese tooi means far and chikai means near), better than chance would predict.

The New Study: Design and Findings

Theresa Matzinger, a linguist at the University of Vienna, led the new study. Researchers created nonsense words such as clisious, smanious and drikious, designing some to be sonically pleasing and others less so using David Crystal’s phoneme ranking as a guide. Native English speakers memorized the pseudowords, completed a recall test, and later rated each word for how pleasing it sounded.

Contrary to expectations, Crystal’s predicted rankings did not exactly match participants’ preferences: words the researchers intended to be appealing scored similarly to those intended to be unappealing, and words designed as neutral were often rated most attractive. However, a clear link emerged between subjective appeal and memory: the words participants rated as most beautiful were also the ones they recalled most easily.

“We found that the words that participants remembered best were also the ones they rated as most beautiful,” Matzinger said. “But these were not always the words that we, as researchers, had originally designed to be the most beautiful.”

Why It Matters

The results imply that sound has an aesthetic dimension independent of meaning, and that this aesthetic influences memory. At the same time, because Crystal’s rankings (based on existing words) differ from judgments of novel words, meaning and cultural usage also shape how pleasing a sound seems. Together, these factors may help explain why some words persist across generations while others fade.

Open Question: It remains unclear whether we remember words better because we find them beautiful, or whether we judge them beautiful because they are easier to remember.

Pop Culture Note

For a pop‑culture example, some viewers noticed how the film Nope changed a threatening entity’s feel simply by naming it Jean Jacket — a reminder that names shape perception as much as they identify.