11 plus Move a Letter questions

What a Move a Letter question looks like

Move a Letter is one of the word puzzles that 11 plus verbal reasoning papers use. Your child is shown two words side by side, such as spear / tick, and five letters to choose between. One of those letters has to leave the first word and join the second. What is left of the first word must still spell a real word, and the second word must turn into a real word once the letter arrives. Nothing else moves: every letter that stays keeps the order it was printed in.

The answer a child gives is the letter, not either of the two new words.

Here are three, worked through in full.

The question. spear / tick. The letters offered are s, p, e, a and r.

The method. Take one letter out of spear at a time and look at what is left. Without the s you have pear, and pear is a word, so s is worth following up. Now the second half of the job. Does an s go into tick and make a word? Put it at the front and you get stick. Both halves work, so you can stop.

The answer. S. Spear becomes pear, and tick becomes stick.

Why a wrong option tempts. E leaves spar, which is a real word, so a child checking the first word only has found something that looks finished. There is nowhere in tick that an e makes a word, so it fails the second test. R tempts from the other direction: it makes trick out of tick straight away, but it leaves “spea” behind, which is not a word. A letter has to pass both tests to be the answer.

The question. swing / lap. The letters offered are i, s, w, n and g.

The method. Start again with the first word. Take out the w and you have sing. Take out the s and you have wing. Take out the n and you have swig. Three of the five letters leave a real word, so this time the first word settles nothing and the second word has to decide. There is no word to be made from lap and a w, and none from lap and an n. An s at the front of lap gives slap.

The answer. S. Swing becomes wing, and lap becomes slap.

Why a wrong option tempts. W is the one most children pick. Sing is a shorter, more familiar word than wing, and taking the second letter out feels like the clever move. It is only wrong at the other end of the question, in a word the child has not looked at yet.

The question. feast / fed. The letters offered are a, s, f, t and e.

The method. The letter does not have to come off the front. Take the e out of the middle of feast, leave the other four letters in place, and you have fast. Then the e has to go into fed, and it does not have to go at the front there either. Slip it into the middle and fed becomes feed.

The answer. E. Feast becomes fast, and fed becomes feed.

Why a wrong option tempts. F leaves east, which is a good, solid word and a satisfying thing to spot. But an f will not go anywhere in fed to make a word, so east is a dead end. This question is a useful one to talk through at home, because it is the shape children find hardest: a letter taken from the middle of one word and dropped into the middle of another.

How to answer it

1. Check that each of the five offered letters is actually in the first word. Now and then one is not, and that one can be crossed off without any thought at all.
2. Take the remaining letters out of the first word one at a time, leaving everything else exactly where it is, and say what is left out loud. Keep any letter that leaves a real word behind.
3. For each letter you kept, try it in the second word. Try it at the front, between the letters, and on the end. Nothing else shifts.
4. Read the two new words back together before answering. Both have to be words you could use in a sentence.
5. If more than one letter survives step 2, the second word is what separates them. Work through the survivors there rather than picking the one that looks neatest.

Common mistakes

• Stopping as soon as the first word works. Swing without its w is sing, and that feels like an answer. It is only half of one. A letter is a candidate until the second word has been checked, not before.
• Only trying the letter at the front of the second word. It often does go there, but far from always. In plank / for the k goes on the end to make fork, in chord / oat the h goes on the end to make oath, and in cloth / tan the h goes into the middle to make than.
• Assuming the letter comes off the front of the first word. Feast becomes fast when the letter leaves the middle, scarf becomes scar and paint becomes pain when it comes off the end. Only checking first letters loses more than half the questions.
• Shuffling the other letters. Cub becomes curb because the r slots in between the u and the b, with c, u and b still in that order. Rearranging is a different puzzle, and a child who starts doing it will produce answers that cannot be checked.
• Accepting something that is nearly a word. “Spea”, “swng” and “wlap” all look plausible for a moment. If a child cannot use the word in a sentence, the letter is wrong.

How to practise 11 plus Move a Letter questions

This type rewards patience more than vocabulary. The words are ordinary, and almost every mistake comes from answering after one test instead of two, so the useful habit is small: find a letter that works in the first word, then say the second word out loud before committing. Short and regular beats long and occasional here, because it is a habit being built rather than a topic being learned. 11+ Daily has a Move a Letter project among its verbal reasoning skills, with questions that are original to 11+ Daily rather than taken from a past paper, re-checked in rounds, and the Today screen decides when the skill comes round again alongside the rest of the eleven plus work. You can see where it sits among the other word and letter puzzles on the 11 plus verbal reasoning page, and there is more on session length in our guide to how much 11 plus practice a child needs each day.

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