The full digit-to-consonant table, worked examples, and how to build a 00-99 peg list you can actually rely on under time pressure.
Numbers are the hardest thing to memorize, for a simple reason: they carry no meaning on their own. "7492" doesn't look like anything, sound like anything, or remind you of anything — it's just four interchangeable symbols. The Major System fixes that by converting every digit into a consonant sound, which you can then build into an ordinary, imageable word. Once you have a word, you have something your brain actually knows how to hold onto.
Here's the full table, how to use it, and how to turn it into a system you can rely on under time pressure.
Vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and the letters w, h, y carry no value at all — they're just filler, free to use however you need to make a real word out of the consonant sounds.
Take two digits, look up their sounds, and fill in vowels until a word appears:
Most numbers have several valid words — you're choosing the one that's most vivid and easiest for you to picture, not searching for a single "correct" answer.
This is the part that actually pays off, and it's also the part people skip. A Major System table is only useful once you've picked one fixed word per number and drilled it until the number retrieves the word automatically, with zero conscious sound-mapping in the moment. If you have to work out that "31" means "m, t/d" every time you see it, you're not using the system — you're doing arithmetic.
A few things that make a peg word stick:
Build the list gradually — a dozen numbers at a time, drilled until instant, before adding more. Trying to memorize all 100 in one sitting rarely survives contact with actual recall.
Once your list exists, converting a long digit string is mechanical: split it into pairs, look up each pair's word, and you have a sequence of ordinary nouns instead of an unreadable string of digits. From there, place each word at a stop along a memory palace route, and the sequence becomes a walk through a place you know — which is a genuinely easy thing to remember, compared to the raw digits.
A plain Major System word gives you one image per two digits. The PAO System builds on the same 00–99 list to compress three numbers into a single scene — a person, doing an action, to an object — which roughly triples how much you can fit into one location. It's the natural next step once your peg list is solid.
Build and drill your own peg list — it shows you the sound hints for every number as you fill it in, converts real digit strings into your own words, and quizzes you on whatever you've filled in so far. Then put it to work on Random Numbers.
