Above the 75th percentile
Twelve words and up on recognition is mostly about how you read the list, not about how long you held it. At the top of the scale nearly everyone does the same thing: they tie the words to each other — into a pair, a scene, a short absurd story. A list of fifteen words merely read falls apart within a minute; a list tied together does not. One thing about the score matters: it counts false alarms as well as hits. A word that was never on the list but fits it in meaning costs exactly as much as one you missed — which is why caution pays here just as well as memory does.
Middle: 25–75
Eight to twelve is the usual picture, and the errors fall in a predictable place: the start and the end of the list come back better than the middle. That observation is over a century old and does not depend on how hard you tried. The five-second distraction between the list and the questions costs more than it looks: it wipes out exactly the tail of the list that would otherwise still be sounding in your head. What moves the score most in this zone is not capacity but the decision to leave unmarked any word you are unsure of — a false alarm is subtracted the same as a miss.
Below the 25th percentile
Six to eight words is the low end of the scale, and it is worth saying plainly what the number does not mean. It is not a screening and it decides nothing. Word-list recall genuinely is used in clinics — in the Russian tradition the method is known through Luria's ten-word procedure — but there it is administered by a specialist, aloud, with repeated trials and a delayed check, and no single number is read on its own. Our version is shorter and runs in a browser. What affects it most has nothing to do with memory: sleep, noise, hurry, unfamiliar words in the list. If you are worried about your own memory or someone else's, that is a question for a doctor, not for a retake.