Does thinking around the word work?

If you are someone who frequently forgets a word when speaking, you have probably heard of the strategy of “thinking around the word.” This strategy involves thinking about concepts or ideas relating to the word in question, usually to remember said word. But the question remains: does the strategy actually work?

Based on some emperical evidence, this strategy does work. I personally use it frequently, and I have taught people around me to do so as well.

But this is not enough. Does thinking around the word really work? According to Brown and McNeill (1966) after conducted a seminal study on the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon, they found that when people couldn’t recall a specific word, they could often remember related information, such as the first letter, number of syllables, or similar-sounding words.

This means that it, at least, it is possible to do the thinking around the word strategy.

According to Collins and Loftus (1975),  the spreading activation theory of semantic processing suggests that activating related concepts can help in retrieving a target word by stimulating interconnected nodes in the semantic network.

Conclusion

We can reasonbly conclude that said strategy actually works, at least scientifically. If you would rather not use this strategy, you can use Blanked. Blanked is a platform that allows you to speak a casual description of the word, and it will find the word you are blanking on.