11 plus vocabulary: how to build it

Because it is the only thing on any preparation list that pays into both halves of the heaviest-weighted part of the test. The West Midlands consortium publishes the weighting of its shared entrance test as 50% for English and verbal reasoning, 25% for non-verbal reasoning and 25% for mathematics. Vocabulary sits underneath both parts of that 50%.

On the comprehension side, an unfamiliar word costs twice: once because the sentence containing it is now a guess, and again because working the word out eats seconds a timed section does not have. Comprehension passages are, in our experience, often older than a child’s usual reading, so this happens more than parents expect. No admissions authority publishes a rule about how old a passage may be, and we are not going to invent one.

On the verbal reasoning side it is even more direct. Synonyms, antonyms, odd one out, analogies and word-meaning questions are vocabulary questions with a puzzle wrapped round them. A child with a wide vocabulary answers them almost by reflex; a child without one has to reason their way to something they simply do not know. The question types are set out on the verbal reasoning page.

Word lists learnt cold do not stick. What sticks is a word met in a real sentence, then met again, then used. The method below asks very little of a parent and is designed to survive a household where nobody has an hour spare.

Monday: collect. While your child reads, they mark the words that stopped them. A pencil dot in the margin is enough. Aim for five to eight words a week, not thirty. If a book produces no words at all it is too easy for this purpose, and if it produces twenty it is too hard for now.

Tuesday: define, in their words. Together, write each word with a meaning your child would say out loud, not a dictionary sentence. “Wistful: sadly wishing for something you cannot have” will be remembered. “Wistful: characterised by melancholy yearning” will not.

Wednesday and Thursday: meet them again. Briefly, on each of the two days. Say the word, ask for the meaning, then ask for a sentence. Spacing the meetings out is what moves a word from recognised to owned, and it is the part families skip.

Friday: use them. Your child writes three sentences using three of the week's words, or tells you about their day using two of them. Absurd sentences are fine and are usually better remembered.

Every few weeks: revisit. Keep the running list. Pull ten old words at random and check them. Retire a word only after it has been right three times, at least a week apart.

Prefer this to happen without you running it? Start a free week of Pathway Eleven and vocabulary work is scheduled into the daily plan, revisited on a spacing the app manages for you.

Roots and prefixes are the highest-leverage thing in this whole area, because each one unlocks a family rather than a word. A child who knows that spect means look can make a decent attempt at inspect, spectator, spectacle, prospect, retrospective and conspicuous without having met any of them.

Teach one a week, out loud, with four examples. Fifteen weeks covers the table above and changes how a child looks at an unfamiliar word for good: they stop staring at it and start taking it apart.

The single best predictor of vocabulary is reading mileage in books slightly above comfort. Not painfully above: a book where roughly one word in fifty is unfamiliar is about right. Below that nothing new arrives; far above it, reading stops being a pleasure and the whole thing collapses.

Year 3. Longer chapter books read alone, plus something harder read aloud together. Being read to is doing real work at this age: a child's listening vocabulary runs years ahead of their reading vocabulary, and the listening pulls the reading up. Classic children's fiction, myths and legends, and non-fiction about whatever the child is currently obsessed with.

Year 4. Widen the diet deliberately. Historical fiction, animal stories, adventure, and some non-fiction with real information density. This is also the year to introduce a book written before about 1960, because the register of older writing is exactly what an entrance-test passage sounds like and it should not be met for the first time in an exam hall.

Year 5. Longer and older. Full-length classic novels, essays and articles written for adults but on subjects a child cares about, and poetry read aloud. Newspaper features are useful here: they carry the argumentative vocabulary that non-fiction comprehension passages use.

These are the words that recur in entrance-test passages and in verbal reasoning, grouped so that a child learns a family at a time rather than an alphabet. The meanings are written for a nine or ten-year-old to read and say back. Work through one theme a fortnight and the list lasts most of a school year.

The same two hundred words are also laid out as one A4 document, two columns to a theme, which is easier to keep on a kitchen wall than a phone. We will email it to you, along with the occasional preparation email for parents in the West Midlands.

Your address is used to send you the word list and the occasional preparation email described above, and nothing else. You can unsubscribe from any of them, and the Privacy Notice sets out what is stored and how to have it deleted.

How people feel

Comprehension passages almost never say “he was sad”. They say one of these instead, and the inference question depends on knowing which.

How people speak

The verb a writer chooses instead of “said” tells you the character's mood. Examiners ask about exactly that choice.

What people are like

Character words are the commonest inference questions of all: the passage shows the behaviour and the question asks for the word.

How things move

Movement verbs carry the atmosphere of a scene. A character who scurries is in a different story from one who saunters.

Weather and landscape

Older passages spend whole paragraphs on scenery. These are the words that keep coming back in them.

Size and amount

These turn up in comprehension and again in verbal reasoning, where the question is usually to find the opposite.

Time and change

Sequencing questions and summary questions both live on these. They are also common as synonym pairs.

Thinking and knowing

The vocabulary of the questions themselves. A child who does not know “infer” is guessing at the instruction, never mind the answer.

Arguing and persuading

Non-fiction passages and author's-purpose questions run on these words almost entirely.

Words from older stories

Where a passage is drawn from an older book, these are the words that are ordinary in that world and unfamiliar in a modern reading book.

Use it as a source of words to meet, not a list to memorise. Ten words worked through by the weekly method above are worth more than a hundred read once.

Vocabulary is learnt in sentences rather than in columns, so the most useful next thing is a real passage. The fuller pack of practice papers puts these words back where they belong, inside passages and verbal reasoning questions, with answer sheets and worked answers. We will send it, along with the occasional preparation email.

Your address is used to send you the practice papers and the occasional preparation email described above, and nothing else. You can unsubscribe from any of them, and the Privacy Notice sets out what is stored and how to have it deleted.

Learning lists cold. A word learnt from a list and never met in a sentence is recognised for a fortnight and gone by half term. Words need context, spacing and use.

Starting too late. Vocabulary is the slowest-moving part of the whole preparation. A family that starts in the spring of Year 5 can still improve technique, timing and grammar substantially, but they cannot buy back three years of reading. This is the strongest argument there is for beginning in Year 3 or Year 4.

Correcting instead of collecting. If every unfamiliar word becomes a test, children stop marking them. The dot in the margin has to be safe.

Confusing hard words with useful words. A ten-year-old does not need obscure words. They need the mid-frequency words adults use without thinking and children's fiction rarely uses at all, and that is the band the list above is drawn from.

The part of the method above that families find hardest to keep up by hand is the spacing: knowing which word is due back today, three weeks after it was collected. Pathway Eleven schedules that, alongside a daily plan of revision, guided teaching and timed practice, with every question in the bank reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher. Full mock rehearsals are part of full membership rather than the trial, and they unlock from Year 4. The price is forty-nine pounds a month for all four areas together, and the first week costs nothing.

What this page is built on

Every outside fact on this page was read at its own published address on 5 September 2026. Both entries below were opened and read on the day stated, rather than taken from anywhere that had already summarised them.

• West Midlands Grammar Schools, The entrance test. The four areas tested and the published weighting of 50% English and verbal reasoning, 25% non-verbal reasoning and 25% mathematics, which is why vocabulary work pays into half the result. Checked 5 September 2026.
• King Edward VI Foundation, Grammar Schools: Entrance Test Information. Two papers of approximately sixty minutes each, divided into individually timed sections, with English comprehension and verbal reasoning among the four areas covered. Checked 5 September 2026.