How to remember new English words you read

You meet a new word in an article, look it up, understand the sentence and keep reading. Two days later you see the same word again and it means nothing. That isn’t a memory problem. It’s how memory works: a word you met once fades fast unless you see it again soon.

The good news is that the fix is small. You don’t need to study more words, you need to see the right ones again at the right time. This guide shows what we found in our own data and a method that takes about five minutes a day.

What 501 saved words show

Lexigo is a browser extension: you select a word on any page to translate it, and you can save it with the sentence it came from. We looked at the 501 words that 55 learners saved while reading a web page, from March to November 2026 (our own accounts, words typed by hand and words copied from lists are left out). Then we checked what happened to each word.

Only 9 of the 55 learners ever reviewed a word on a different day from the one they saved it.

Saving a word feels like learning it, but it’s closer to a bookmark. Two thirds of the words were never seen again, and most of the rest were reviewed once, minutes after saving, while the word was still fresh. That review is easy and it barely helps: the word is still in your head, so you aren’t really remembering it.

The sample is small and it’s only Lexigo users, so treat the exact numbers with care. But the pattern is clear: the step that is missing is the second day.

Why the next day matters

Three of the best-studied findings in memory research explain it.

• Forgetting is fast at first, then slows down. Hermann Ebbinghaus measured this in the 1880s, and it is now called the forgetting curve: most of what you forget, you forget in the first day or two.
• Spacing beats cramming. Seeing something several times spread over days is remembered far longer than the same number of repetitions in one sitting. A large review of hundreds of experiments (Cepeda and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2006) found this again and again for words and facts.
• Recalling beats rereading. Trying to remember a word before you look at the answer makes it stick better than reading it again (Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science, 2006). This is called retrieval practice.

Vocabulary researchers such as Paul Nation also point out that one encounter is rarely enough to learn a word: you usually need to meet it many times, in different sentences.

So the review that matters is not the one five minutes after saving. It’s the one tomorrow, when the word has started to fade and you have to make an effort to bring it back.

A 5-minute method for the words you read

1. Save fewer words, but the right ones

You don’t need every word you don’t know. Save a word when one of these is true:

• you think you’ll meet it again in the things you read (news on your topic, your work, your course);
• you want to use it yourself;
• you looked it up and the translation didn’t fit the sentence.

In our data, 77% of the saved words that have a level are B2 or above, and more than half are C1–C2. Learners save the hard words. That’s fine, but don’t skip the everyday words you keep misunderstanding: they come back far more often.

2. Keep the sentence

A word on its own is hard to remember. A word in the sentence where you found it carries a meaning, a topic and a small memory of the moment you read it. Save the sentence with the word, or write it down next to it.

3. Look at it again tomorrow, and try before you check

The next day, look at the word and try to recall what it means before you check the answer. If you remember, great. If you don’t, look at the meaning and the sentence again, and try once more at the end of the session. Both outcomes help.

4. Then spread it out

After the first day, wait longer each time you remember the word. A simple schedule:

When you forget, start the word again from the next day. This is roughly what spaced-repetition apps do for you (Lexigo uses the SM-2 algorithm, which follows this pattern).

5. Use it once

Write one sentence of your own with the word, or say it out loud. Using a word, even once, links it to your own ideas, which makes it easier to remember later.

Where learners meet new words

We also looked at where those 501 words were saved: only the type of site, never the page.

One in five learners saved a word from a conversation with an AI chatbot, and those chats produced almost a quarter of all the saved words. If you use ChatGPT or Gemini in English, that is reading practice too: ask in English, and when the answer uses a word you don’t know, it is a word worth keeping, because it came up in something you actually wanted to know.

How to do this without thinking about it

You can follow this method with a notebook or with flashcards. Lexigo does the same steps for you:

• Read: select any word on any page to see its translation into your language, its meaning, and an AI explanation of what it means in that sentence.
• Keep: save it, and the sentence and page come with it.
• Review: two buttons, “Got it” and “Forgot”. Lexigo schedules the next review (the next day, then about 6 days, then 2 weeks…) and sends a reminder the next day with the words you saved, so the second day actually happens.

If you’d rather start from a list than from your reading, the top 1,000 English words and the common phrasal verbs lists work the same way: 10 new words a day, reviewed with the same schedule.