11 plus Same Missing Letter questions

What a Same Missing Letter question looks like

Same Missing Letter is one of the word puzzles that 11 plus verbal reasoning papers use. Your child is given an ordinary sentence with two of its words damaged in the same way: the same single letter has been taken out of both, and the letters that remain are jumbled up. Five letters are offered, and only one puts both words back so the sentence reads sensibly. The nearest question type to it is Insert a Letter, and the difference matters. There the fragments keep their letters in order and the missing letter always goes on the end of one fragment and the front of the next, with no sentence to help; here the letters are scrambled, the missing letter can belong anywhere inside the word, and the sentence itself is the clue.

Three of them, worked through in full.

The question. The cat curled up by the warm irf and fell straight to lspe. The letters offered are i, e, o, s and u.

The method. Read the sentence before looking at the letters. A cat curls up by something warm, and then it does the thing cats do. Fire and sleep are the obvious guesses, so check them against the letters. Irf is three letters, so its word is four. An e with i, r and f makes fire. An e with l, s, p and e makes sleep, because sleep has two e’s and only one was taken away. Both words come back and the sentence reads properly.

The answer. E, giving fire and sleep.

Why a wrong option tempts. O turns lspe into slope, a real word that comes to mind quickly. A child who starts at the second jumble has something that works and feels finished. But nothing can be built from i, r, f and an o, and “fell straight to slope” is not a sentence. The letter has to restore both words, not one.

The question. The athlete crossed the rtkc and lifted her shining gold emld. The letters offered are i, u, e, y and a.

The method. The sentence does most of the work again. An athlete crosses a track, and the shining gold thing lifted at the end of a race is a medal. Test an a on the first jumble: a with r, t, k and c makes track. The same a on the second: a with e, m, l and d makes medal. Read it back with both words in place and it is ordinary English.

The answer. A, giving track and medal.

Why a wrong option tempts. Two of the other letters rebuild the first word on their own. An i makes trick out of rtkc and a u makes truck, both words a child knows well. Neither turns emld into anything that fits the sentence, so both fall at the second word. When more than one letter solves the first jumble, the second decides between them.

The question. The hiker climbed a steep ilh and admired the misty aveyl. The letters offered are a, t, e, r and l.

The method. A hiker climbs a hill, and on a misty day you look down from one at a valley. Now check the letters. Hill needs two l’s and ilh already has one, so adding an l gives h, i, l and l. Valley needs two as well and aveyl has one, so an l gives v, a, l, l, e and y. The same letter rebuilds both words.

The answer. L, giving hill and valley.

Why a wrong option tempts. An a turns ilh into hail, a real word and a weather word, so it sits comfortably beside “misty”. It does nothing for aveyl, and nobody climbs a steep hail. It also catches children who rule l out because there is already an l in the jumble. Only one copy was removed, so a letter appearing twice in the finished word still shows once.

How to answer it

1. Read the whole sentence first, treating the two jumbles as blanks. Most narrow each gap to two or three sensible words before a letter is tried.
2. Count the letters in each jumble and add one. Irf is three letters, so its word is four long. That alone rules out most of the guesses.
3. Take one offered letter at a time and try it on both jumbles. Add it to the first and see whether those letters rearrange into a word that fits the sentence, then do the same with the second. Drop it the moment either one fails.
4. Remember the letter may already be in the jumble. One copy was taken out, not every copy, so hill leaves an l in ilh.
5. Put both finished words into the sentence and read it back. If it sounds like something a person would say, that is the answer.

Common mistakes

• Testing one jumbled word and stopping there. This is the biggest cause of lost marks here, and the wrong options punish it. Trick and truck both come out of rtkc, and neither survives the second word.
• Trying to read the jumble from left to right. Irf, lspe and aveyl are not words and are not meant to look like them. Only which letters are there matters, never their order.
• Ruling a letter out because it is already in the jumble. Sleep leaves an e in lspe and hill leaves an l in ilh, and in both questions that letter is the answer.
• Ignoring the sentence and grinding through the letters. Five letters against two jumbles is a lot of work, and every one of these sentences hands the meaning over for free. Guessing the words first turns the puzzle into a quick check.
• Accepting a real word that does not fit. Slope and hail are proper words, honestly built from the letters given. They still lose the question: the test is the whole sentence, not one word out of it.

How to practise 11 plus Same Missing Letter questions

The habit worth building is the order of operations: sentence first, letters second, both jumbles checked before committing. It is quick to teach and costs no time to apply, so a few of these regularly does more than one long sitting a fortnight. Saying the guessed words aloud helps too, because a child hears that fire and sleep belong in that sentence faster than they can test five letters against two anagrams. 11+ Daily has a Same Missing Letter project among its verbal reasoning skills, with questions that are original to 11+ Daily rather than taken from a past paper, a bank that is re-checked in rounds, and a Today screen that decides when this 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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