11 plus Compound Words questions

What a Compound Words question looks like in the 11 plus

Compound Words is one of the verbal reasoning formats used in 11 plus papers. Your child is given two brackets, each holding three short pieces of a word. One piece from the first bracket and one from the second join together to spell a single real word. The piece from the first bracket always goes in front, and nothing may be added, removed or shuffled: the letters stay exactly as they are.

There are nine possible pairings and only one spells a word. The word that results usually has nothing to do with the meaning of the two pieces, and that is the whole difficulty. Papers file this under compound words, but many of the answers are not compounds in the everyday sense at all.

(as hot ill) (sure wag fog)

Try each piece from the first bracket in front of each piece from the second, in order: as-sure, as-wag, as-fog, then hot-sure, hot-wag, hot-fog, then ill-sure, ill-wag, ill-fog. Read each join aloud as you go, because your ear catches a real word faster than your eye does.

The answer is as + sure, which spells assure, meaning to tell someone that something is certain.

The tempting pair is hot and fog. Both are proper words, both belong to the same weather-ish idea, and a child expecting something like football keeps circling back to them. But “hotfog” is not a word. Meanwhile “as” and “sure” look like leftovers rather than a promising pair, so they are the two a child is least likely to test, which is exactly why the question uses them.

(its men hand) (elm some dry)

Same method, working left to right through all nine. The answer is hand + some, which spells handsome.

Look at what happened to the meaning. A handsome person has nothing to do with hands, and nothing to do with “some” either. The two pieces are carrying spelling, not sense.

The tempting pair here is hand and dry, because a hand dryer is a real thing and the two words sit together naturally. It fails twice over: “hand dry” is two words rather than one, and it is not spelt “handdry”. If a pairing only works when you leave a gap in the middle, it is not the answer.

(beg mas yes) (cot ram dry)

Five of these six pieces are ordinary words: beg, yes, cot, ram and dry. “Mas” is not a word at all. That is the trap. A child who only tests pairs of real words works through beg-cot, beg-ram, beg-dry, yes-cot and the rest, finds nothing, and decides they must have misread the question.

The answer is mas + cot, which spells mascot. A mascot has no link to cots.

How to answer it

1. Take the first piece in the left bracket and try it in front of each of the three pieces in the right bracket. Then do the same with the second piece, then the third. Nine tries, always in the same order, so nothing gets missed.
2. Say each join out loud, or under your breath if you are in a test. A real word sounds right before it looks right, and this is much faster than staring at the brackets.
3. Ignore what the pieces mean. You are checking spelling, not sense, and the finished word is usually about something else entirely.
4. Read the letters of the word you have made in order, without adding or dropping any. Car and rot make carrot, with the two r’s coming one from each piece, and that is fine. Changing a letter to make a pairing work is not.
5. Stop as soon as one pairing spells a real word. Only one does, so there is no need to finish the list.

Common mistakes

• Hunting for a meaningful compound. Children expect something like football or sunshine, where both halves show up in the meaning. Most answers in this format are not like that. Assure, carrot, mascot, garment, bargain and harvest all come from pieces that say nothing about the finished word.
• Only testing pieces that are words on their own. Fragments such as mas, ment, gar, ble and yond turn up often, and a child who skips them never reaches the answer. Every piece gets tried, word or not.
• Joining the brackets the wrong way round. The first bracket always supplies the front of the word. Cot and mas spell nothing, and neither do side and a, or rot and car.
• Accepting a two-word phrase. Hand dry, hot fog and car park all feel plausible and none of them is one word. The test is whether it can be written with no gap and no hyphen.
• Skipping about instead of working through in order. Nine pairings is a short list, but only when it is done the same way every time. Jumping around is how a child misses the pairing that works, and then starts bending the spelling to force one of the others to fit.

How to practise it

The thing that improves fastest here is the habit rather than the vocabulary: nine pairings, in a fixed order, read aloud, meaning ignored. Ten minutes once a week is usually plenty, as long as your child does them the same way each time and says out loud why a rejected pairing failed. It also helps to notice opaque words in ordinary reading, the ones that split into pieces explaining nothing, such as carpet, harvest, infant, bandit and forecast. That is the shape most answers take, and the eleven plus rewards a child who recognises the shape early enough to spend their time on the pairings rather than on working out what is being asked.

11+ Daily has a Compound Words project among its verbal reasoning skills, on laptop, tablet or phone, and the Today screen brings the format back round when your child has not seen it for a while rather than leaving that to memory. The questions are original to 11+ Daily: nothing is a past paper and nothing is licensed from another publisher, and the bank is re-checked in rounds, with anything that did not hold up rewritten or removed. To see how this format sits alongside the others, read our guide to 11 plus verbal reasoning, or browse the other practice topics.

Questions parents ask