Cognition · ~5 minutes
How well do you reason with words?
Fifteen questions — analogies, synonyms, and antonyms — climbing from easy to hard. Harder items count for more, so your score reflects your ceiling, not just the questions you breezed through. This is crystallized ability: the verbal knowledge reading builds over a lifetime.
Each question offers four choices; pick the single best answer. The questions get harder as you go, and there's no going back once you choose. Work at a comfortable pace — this test rewards knowledge and careful judgment, not speed.
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Your verbal reasoning
Percentiles are approximations from a fifteen-item, difficulty-weighted test — a genuine snapshot, not a normed clinical score. Verbal reasoning is deeply tied to vocabulary and reading in the test's language, so treat a result as reflecting exposure as much as raw ability.
About this instrument
What this measures — and what it doesn't
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Measures
Crystallized verbal ability
How well you grasp relationships between words: analogies, shades of meaning, opposites. Unlike fluid reasoning, this draws on knowledge you've built — which is why verbal scores keep rising with reading across a lifetime.
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Method
15 graded items, weighted
Five easy, five medium, five hard, drawn from an authored bank and presented easiest-first. Answer options are shuffled each run, and the score weights each item by difficulty so a hard win counts triple an easy one.
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Result
Percentile + tier breakdown
You get an approximate percentile plus how you did at each difficulty — useful for seeing whether you plateau at medium or push into the hard tier. Near-chance accuracy is flagged and the score withheld.
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Limits
Honest limits
This is an English-vocabulary test, so it reflects language exposure as much as reasoning — non-native speakers are genuinely disadvantaged, and we say so. Fifteen items is a snapshot, not a normed instrument, and never an aptitude credential.
Go deeper
The science behind this instrument
Fluid vs crystallized intelligence
Why verbal ability is the clearest example of knowledge you build over a lifetime.
Read DataHow IQ changes with age
Verbal scores rise for decades even as processing speed falls — here's why.
Read FundamentalsWhat is IQ, really?
Where verbal reasoning sits in the bigger picture of measured intelligence.
ReadQuestions
Before you begin
What does a verbal reasoning test measure?
Your grasp of relationships between words and ideas — through analogies, synonyms, and antonyms. It leans on crystallized intelligence: the vocabulary and verbal knowledge you accumulate through reading and experience, rather than raw processing speed.
Why are harder questions worth more?
Getting an easy item right tells us less than nailing a hard one. The score weights each item by difficulty, so your result reflects the ceiling of your verbal ability, not just how many gentle questions you cleared.
Does this test disadvantage non-native English speakers?
Honestly, somewhat — any English vocabulary test does. Verbal reasoning is inseparable from language exposure, so a lower score can reflect how long you've read in English rather than reasoning ability itself. We flag near-chance results and say this plainly in your results.
Can verbal reasoning improve?
Yes, more than most cognitive skills. Crystallized abilities like vocabulary grow across the whole lifespan through reading, so verbal scores tend to rise with age and exposure. Wide reading is the single most reliable way to improve.
Verbal is one domain. See all five.
The full adaptive test maps verbal reasoning alongside pattern, numeric, spatial, and memory.
Start the assessment