One Step Now Education
May 1, 2026
mnemonic
This investigation takes us from spelling tricks to ancient Greek, where we’ll uncover the unusual structure hiding inside the word mnemonic. That strange <mn> at the beginning is a clue about the word’s origin and a gateway to understanding how letters can shift their jobs across a word family. We’ll discover what makes a digraph work (and when it stops working), explore what happens when sounds vanish but letters remain, and meet the zeroed allophone. By the end, you’ll see why understanding the English orthographic system beats memorizing spelling tricks every time.
After the investigation, keep reading for our new Into Practice segment.
Meaning
What is this word’s meaning and how does the word function?
Some famous mnemonics include HOMES to remember the names for the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior) and ROY G BIV to remember the order of the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). A mnemonic is a memory device to help you remember things.
One of the first mnemonics you may have come across when learning to spell was “<i> before <e> except after <c>,” a mnemonic that only works 60% of the time. We learned words like weird and neighbor as “exceptions.” For many students with poor memory skills, spelling became a frustrating game of memorizing rules and spellings.
First, we need to understand the concepts behind what we are learning. We want our students to understand why the English orthography works the way it does, not to memorize accurate spellings using arbitrary rules based primarily on sound.
Mnemonics are best used for things that lack inherent meaning, like lists or sequences. I don’t need to know the names of the Great Lakes, but I always do because of the mnemonic and my ability to know what each letter stands for.
We have other inane mnemonics drilled into children hoping to improve their spelling:
- when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking (true only 50% of the time)
- Your principal is your PAL
- Remember because is Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants
Here’s one I remember from my own learning:
I read a story about a farmer named Sep whose wife spotted a rat one day and called out, “Sep, a rat! Eeee!” to help me remember how to spell separate. It worked.
For a while.
Then I learned that the word separate is related to prepare and disparate and other words from the Latin parare, “get ready.” This association not only helped me with the spelling, but with the meaning as well.
Structure
What are the elements that make up this word’s structure?
What affixes might we peel off of the word mnemonic? What about <-ic> also found on words like music or symbolic?
mnemon + ic?
That <mn> structure up front is kind of funky. It’s a sign that the word probably is not from English. It reminds me of unusual graphemes in pneumonia or myrrh.
I’m ready to look at Etymonline to see what evidence I can find for the elements in this word.
The word entered our lexicons in 1753 and is a Latinized version of the Greek mnemonikos. That word is from Greek mnemon which itself is from Greek mneme, “memory.” Therefore, our word sum is probably
mneme + on + ic
The entry goes on to say that mneme is probably derived from the base of mnasthai, “remember.” Obtaining the English base from a Greek verb is not as “clean” as removing the infinitive suffix in Latin. I believe we can use the noun mneme as our orthographic evidence.
The term mnemonic device came along in 1858.
Relatives
What are the word’s relatives and history?
To find relatives for this word, I can plug mneme back into the search engine of Etymonline and go through the entries it gives me to see if they too are derived from mneme.
There’s anamnesis, a “calling to mind.” Unfortunately, it does not share a base. It could go in an etymological circle, as it does share the root of mneme. Etymological circles hold the relatives that share a root but not a base.
There’s amnesia, a word I’ve investigated before. Again, the base isn’t an exact fit, and this word must go in our etymological circle.
If we go back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root in the entry for mnemonic, we can find references to amnesty, comment, demented, mantra, memento, monitor, museum, music, premonition, and reminiscent. All of these are etymologically related to mnemonic. They all have something to do with “thinking.”
Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
We pronounce the <mn> at the beginning of mnemonic as /n/. Some might say the <m> is “silent.” Both letters get pronounced in words like amnesia or amnesty.
Similarly, we see the same phenomenon happen with autumn or condemn. In those words, the <m> and <n> are separate graphemes. In autumn and condemn, we pronounce the <m> as /m/ and the <n> is unpronounced. In the relatives autumnal and condemnation, however, both the <m> and <n> are pronounced. This means the <n> cannot be part of a digraph <mn> in these words. You cannot have a digraph where one letter is pronounced and the other is not. Then it ceases to be a digraph. A digraph is a grapheme consisting of two consecutive letters performing the same function. In mnemonic, they are spelling /n/.
When a grapheme is pronounced in one family member but not another, as in autumn/autumnal and condemn/condemnation, the unpronounced grapheme is referred to as a zeroed allophone. You see this same feature with the <g> in signal vs. sign. It happens with the <b> in crumb vs. crumble. Zeroed allophones are fairly regular across the English orthographic system.
Next Steps
What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?
What are other mnemonics you or your students have been taught to remember spellings? Can you find better meaning or familial connections to help them understand instead?
The <-ic> is a common suffix that’s worth investigating in depth. (Big Idea #4)
Besides <mn> what are other signs a word could be from Greek? Look back at the examples of pneumoniaand myrrh. (Big Idea #6)
So instead of fooling with which elephant is big and which elephant is small or a farmer’s wife and her fear of rats, I’ve chosen to work with meaning, structure, and word families. Turns out, when you understand how the English spelling system works, you don’t need tricks to help you. It just makes sense.
Remember that.
Stay curious,
Brad
Into Practice: Adapting for Beginning Students
These Greek spellings may not show up in the vocabulary of younger students. Or do they? Your students might wonder about why /f/ is sometimes spelled with a <ph>.
And an investigation of the word phone might just be the way to introduce this idea of a <ph> as a “sign of Greek.” They are probably familiar with telephone, microphone, headphones, and maybe megaphones, saxophones, and xylophones. Surely they’ve learned about homophones? And those saxophones and xylophones make up the symphony!
Once they’ve learned about <ph>, you can have some fun with a scavenger hunt for <ph> words. They can either find them in their own reading, or you can plant some around the room. You can then look them up together to see if they are actually from Greek or not! They might be surprised that words they know like dolphin and trophy have a Greek origin! They might be even more surprised when they find one that does not, like nephew.
PS. A zeroed allophone, like the <g> in sign is different than an etymological marker like the <o> in people. An etymological marker is also spelling silence. However, in no other word in the morphological family is the etymological marker pronounced.
PPS. Are you interested in exploring the Big Ideas of English Orthography in depth? Then sign up for the class I co-teach called Connecting the D.O.T.S.: Integrating Scientific Word Study into Your Practice here.
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