11 plus Pick the Meaning questions

What a Pick the Meaning question looks like

Pick the Meaning is a vocabulary format used in 11 plus English work. One word is printed on its own, with no sentence around it, and five written definitions follow, labelled A to E. One of them is what the word means and the other four are wrong. What separates it from the other vocabulary practice a child meets is the direction of travel: here the word is the question and a full definition is the answer, rather than a sentence being the question and a single word the answer.

The words cover a wide range. Some are ones most Year 5 children will have met, such as capacity, pedestrian, toil and wary. Others are well beyond everyday speech: brusque, tenacity, squalid, heyday. Verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs all turn up.

One detail matters. The five definitions in any one question are written in the same grammatical shape as each other. If the word is a verb, all five begin “To …”. If it is an adverb, all five begin “In a … way”. A child cannot narrow the field by spotting an odd one out, so they have to think about meaning.

Example one: abundant

The word is abundant, and the five choices are: easy to notice or understand without any confusion at all; left over after most of something has been used up or taken away; present in such great quantity that there is more than enough; shared out evenly between two or more people in equal parts; built or produced quickly and without much care for quality.

Before reading any of them, say what you think abundant means. Most children can get to “lots of it” from a garden abundant with flowers. Now look for the choice that says that, and only the third one does. The answer is the third choice.

The tempting wrong answer is the second one, about something being left over. It is about quantity, so it lives in roughly the right area, and a child who has fixed on the area rather than the meaning will take it. But that is the definition of remaining, which is about what is still there after most has gone, and abundant is about there being plenty in the first place. The first choice defines obvious, the fourth defines shared, and the fifth defines shoddy. Every one is a real definition of a real word, just not this one.

Example two: painstakingly

The word is painstakingly, and the five choices all begin the same way: in a careless way that skims over most of the fiddly details; in a bored way that rushes through to reach the end fast; in a loud way that draws attention to every small achievement; in a brave way that shows no sign of fear at dangerous tasks; in a careful way that takes time to get every detail right.

This one is decided by what a child does with the word’s parts. Painstakingly holds “pains” and “taking”, and “taking pains” is an old way of saying taking trouble over something. A model maker painstakingly glues each tiny part of a ship in place. The answer is the last choice, about taking time to get every detail right.

The trap is the fourth choice, about being brave at dangerous tasks. A child who reads “pains” as hurt goes straight to it, because bravery is what you need when something might hurt. The first choice is worth a second look too, because it is the exact opposite: careless is what painstaking is not. Wrong options in this format are very often the opposite of the answer.

Example three: thwart

The word is thwart, and the five choices are: help someone to finish a task more quickly; prevent someone from accomplishing something; warn someone about a danger they cannot see; forgive someone for a mistake they have made; persuade someone to change their mind politely.

Start with feel rather than meaning. Thwart is a blunt, unfriendly sounding word, and it turns up in sentences where a plan is thwarted. That feel rules out helping, forgiving and persuading politely, all of which are kind acts, and leaves two. Warning someone is not really about stopping them, but preventing someone is. The answer is the second choice.

The first choice is the built-in opposite again, and it is the one a child picks when they have half-remembered the word as something to do with effort.

How to answer it

1. Say what you think the word means in your own words, before reading a single option. Five well-written definitions can talk a child out of something they actually knew.
2. Decide whether the word feels positive, negative or neutral, and rule out any option with the wrong feel. This alone usually removes two or three.
3. Read all five to the end. The first one that looks about right is often a near miss placed early on purpose.
4. Put the word and your chosen definition into the same sentence and check they can swap places without changing what the sentence says.
5. Before committing, look at the option you nearly picked and try to name the word it really defines. If you can name it, you have proved to yourself it is not this one.

Common mistakes

• Choosing the option that is in the right area rather than the right meaning. “Left over after most has been used up” and “present in more than enough quantity” are both about amounts, and only one is abundant.
• Trusting a familiar chunk inside the word. Latent is not about being late, invincible is not invisible, an optimist is not an optician, and painstakingly is nothing to do with pain.
• Taking the opposite. Almost every question includes one. Wary against carefree, simultaneous against one after another, tenacity against giving up easily.
• Stopping at the first option that reads well. All five read well, because all five are proper definitions. Reading well is not evidence.
• Knowing only a word’s most common meaning. Novel is a book and also means new. Forge is what a blacksmith does and also means to make a fake copy. The keyed definition is sometimes the sense a child meets second.

How to practise 11 plus Pick the Meaning questions

Nothing beats reading widely, because this format rewards having met a word before rather than having revised it the night before. When your child hits a word they do not know, ask them to guess from the sentence first and then look it up, in that order. Short and regular beats long and occasional, which is the pattern we set out in how much 11 plus practice a child needs each day. 11+ Daily has a Pick the Meaning project alongside the rest of our 11 plus English practice, on laptop, tablet or phone, and questions a child gets wrong come back until they get them right. Every question is original to 11+ Daily, nothing is a past paper and nothing is licensed from another publisher, and the bank is re-checked in rounds.

Questions parents ask