Free 11+ Vocabulary List Download
Featuring 175 Eleven Plus words and 50 common roots and affixes.
If you download the vocabulary list above, it might not be exactly what you were expecting – it’s actually more helpful (we promise!). Instead of a list of alphabetised words, you’ll find a list of alphabetised roots and affixes, along with example words.
I used to provide a regular 11+ vocabulary list. If you search hard enough online, you can probably still find it. I stopped distributing this list several years ago, however.
Here’s why I stopped using traditional 11+ vocabulary lists and you should, too:
It’s one thing to be able to regurgitate a perfect definition; it’s another thing entirely to understand what it means.
By giving a vocabulary list, I was inadvertently encouraging parents to teach their children to recite word meanings. The problem was that they were rarely going beyond that.
Although my students could regurgitate definitions, they weren’t developing an understanding that enabled them to answer 11+ exam questions or use the words appropriately in their creative writing.
One unfortunate result of rote learning was that children were actually mixing up words and definitions. If I asked a child what “sufficient” meant, they would quickly give me a dictionary-perfect definition… for a completely different word. Not ideal.
You know what they say, “life can’t be all haha hehe!” That may be true, however, I still didn’t feel right about giving my students a task that they actively hated, especially when I knew that vocabulary could be fun!
Vocabulary lists simply aren’t memorable. In order to remember something easily, we need some kind of memory hook, like seeing a visual or hearing a word in context. You don’t get any of that with a word list. As a result, learning words from a list takes longer and is much more tedious.
I want my students to become enthusiastic learners and to have time for activities outside of study. Giving inefficient word lists was definitely not the way to achieve that.
When children understand the most common English roots and affixes, they can start to decode the meanings of words all by themselves, without the need for memorising definitions. Even long and seemingly difficult words, like “antidisestablishmentarianism” can be broken down into parts.
Rather than learning hundreds of words by definition, I decided to turn my students into “word mechanics”, who could use their knowledge of roots and affixes to decode completely new words. This was quicker, more fun and more effective.
With all that in mind, I stopped giving out my usual 11+ vocabulary list and started giving a list of roots and affixes instead.
There are still 175 words listed, however, this list encourages you to cover the words in logical batches (rather than going through each letter of the alphabet) and to discuss how the words relate to the root/affix. This makes them much more memorable.
You can start taking a better approach to vocabulary by downloading the list below.
Here’s that link again for you – https://link.wordier.online/11plusvocablist
P.S. Most of the Wordier materials follow the approach of teaching words by root, prefix and suffix. Our vocabulary workbook guides you through this approach seamlessly. Click here to see how.
