Verbal Analogy Test With Answers
Two words go together for a reason; a third is waiting for the word that completes it the same way. A free online verbal analogy test — word analogies, if that is the name you know them by: 12 items, 4 options each, a few minutes, no account, everything generated and scored in your browser. Every answer is explained the moment you give it — right or wrong, the relation is named in words with your own two pairs in it — and at the end the whole run is listed out: each analogy, what you picked, what the answer was, and why. The result itself is your count, your mean time and the relations that held you up.
Take the test
Work out how the first two words go together, then complete the second pair the same way. Keys 1–4 work too.
owl is to hoot as bee is to ?
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of 12 analogies solved
A clean run: the relation was named before the options had a chance to pull, including on the pairs where both words mean nearly the same thing. Time is the thing left to improve.
Most of the run came apart. What usually survives is the intensity relation — two words for the same quality, where the answer is a matter of degree rather than of topic.
About half. The usual culprit is the option that belongs to the first pair rather than the second: it is on the screen precisely because it is tempting, and it is never the answer.
Fewer than half this time. One twelve-item run in a browser tab says nothing about your vocabulary or your reasoning — it is a warm-up, and the relations come back on the next run.
- The sound it makes
- — / 2
- Where it lives
- — / 2
- Where they work
- — / 2
- What it is made of
- — / 2
- What they make
- — / 2
- The same thing, stronger
- — / 2
Each explanation holds for up to 4.3 s — click the card, or press Space or Enter, to move on sooner.
12 analogies, easy ones first, each one explained as soon as you answer. There is no time limit — the clock exists only so the result can tell you how long you took. Nothing is uploaded; it all stays in this tab.
Your answers, with the rule for each
Every analogy of the run you just took: what you were shown, what you tapped, what the answer was, and the rule behind it. The rules are read off the items themselves, so nothing here is a general description of the format — it is what these 12 were actually built from.
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
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Your answer Correct answer
That was a single run. In the app it becomes a short daily session, with a Focus Index to show for it.
Point your camera at the code — the App Store opens.
What verbal analogies are
Verbal analogies are two pairs of words joined by one relation, written owl : hoot :: bee : ? and read “owl is to hoot as bee is to what”. Name what links the first two words, carry that link to the third, and the fourth word follows.
Word analogies is the same thing under a different name, and both names are used here: an item is a verbal analogy because the material is words, and a word analogy because the item is a word pair. Nothing changes between the two — the 6 relations listed further down are what a run is actually built from.
What a verbal analogy test measures
A relation, not a definition — and, with 4 words in front of you, whether you can hold that relation steady while the other options argue with it.
Knowing what the words mean is the price of entry, not the task. The work is to name the link — Charles Spearman called it the eduction of relations and correlates in the 1920s and put it at the center of what reasoning tests are for — and then to carry that link across to a pair that shares nothing else with the first. Two items can use words a ten-year-old knows and still differ enormously in how hard the relation is to see, which is exactly why the format survived a century of test design.
What it does not measure is how large your vocabulary is. Every word in this test is deliberately common; the difficulty lives in the relation, and the 6 relations below are ordered by how much work it takes to name them.
Where word analogies come from
Verbal analogies are among the oldest item types still in use. The Miller Analogies Test, built for graduate admissions in 1926 and never retired, is made of nothing else — a hundred-odd analogies against the clock. The SAT carried them for decades and dropped them in 2005, when the reading section was rebuilt around passages; the GRE dropped them with its 2011 revision. Both changes were about what an admissions test should reward, not a finding that the item type stopped working.
It stayed in the reasoning batteries, where it still does the job it was picked for: it is compact, it generates endlessly, and it separates people on relations rather than on facts. The one thing it cannot escape is language — which is why the wordless twin of this page, the Number Analogy Test, exists at all.
The 6 relations you will meet
12 analogies to a run — 2 from each relation, drawn from 8 pairs apiece and served easy ones first. Each example below is a real draw from the same generator the test uses; the answer, the part the test withholds, is shown in color.
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The sound it makes
owl hoot bee buzz
The most concrete relation here, and the one a run opens with: each animal has exactly one call, and no two of them share it.
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Where it lives
bee hive chicken coop
Every one of these names belongs to a single species in ordinary use — a kennel is a dog’s and nothing else’s — so a wrong option is wrong in kind, not by a shade of meaning.
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Where they work
nurse hospital mechanic garage
An occupation and the room or vehicle it happens in. The pairing is about the work, never about who does it.
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What it is made of
sail canvas chain steel
A thing and what it is made of. The direction matters: the second word is the material, and reading the pair backwards is the quickest way to pick a wrong button.
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What they make
potter vase brewer beer
Someone who makes something, and the thing. Distant trades on purpose — no two of them could produce each other’s object.
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The same thing, stronger
tired exhausted hungry starving
The hardest of the six: both words say the same thing and only the strength differs. Nothing about the topic tells you the answer, so the relation has to be read as a matter of degree.
How to read your result
Three numbers, and they are worth more together than apart.
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The count
How many of the 12 you solved. With 4 options per analogy, tapping at random is worth about 3 of them, so the count only starts saying something above that — and a run of guesses shows up in the time as plainly as in the number.
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The per-relation tally
Which relations actually came apart. Both animal-sound items solved and both intensity ones missed is a different result from the reverse, even when the count is identical — and it tells you what to look at next time.
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The mean time
Seconds per analogy you solved. Wrong answers are left out on purpose: a fast wrong answer is a fast wrong answer, and folding it in would make giving up quickly look like fluency.
The verdict word under your score is a rough banding of the count and nothing more — the cuts are at 11, 9 and 6 solved. It exists so the number has a sentence attached to it, not because four bands are a finding. Two runs half an hour apart will often land in different bands, which is itself the most useful thing this page can tell you about how much a single run is worth.
What this version cannot tell you
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12 analogies is short
Long enough to meet all 6 relations and get a feel for which ones you spot, not long enough to be a measurement. A run where one lucky guess lands is a run that reads a point higher than it should.
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Vocabulary is in the result whether you like it or not
Every word here is deliberately ordinary, so the item turns on the relation rather than on whether you have met the word. That trims the vocabulary effect; it cannot remove it, and a test in your second language will read harder than the same test in your first.
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Four options do some of the work
With the choices in front of you, a relation can be confirmed by elimination instead of named outright. The same analogy with a blank to fill in is a harder task, and the two are not comparable.
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It is not a diagnosis or a score
Verbal analogies appear inside professionally administered batteries and admissions tests, always beside other item types and read by someone qualified. One format on one page is not that, and nothing here turns your count into a score of any kind.
Questions about the verbal analogy test
Does it show the answers and explain them?
Yes. Every one of the 12 analogies is explained the moment you answer it — right or wrong — by naming the relation in words, with your own two pairs in it. When the run ends the whole thing is listed under the card: each analogy as you saw it, the word you picked, the correct word, and the relation that joins them.
Do I need an account?
No. The verbal analogies are generated in your browser and scored there too — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the result is gone when you close the tab. There is no email box anywhere on this page.
Is this a vocabulary test?
Not on purpose. All 48 pairs use everyday American English with no proper nouns and no specialist terms, because the item is meant to turn on the relation between two words rather than on whether you know one of them. If a word here is new to you, the item is measuring the wrong thing and we would rather hear about it.
Why is one of the options a word from the first pair?
Because that is the classic pull of the verbal analogy format, and meeting it is part of the task. Half the items plant the second word of the example pair among the options: it is the answer you land on by matching associations instead of relations, and it is never correct — within a relation each word belongs to exactly one pair.
Do the analogies repeat if I take it again?
The pairs do not repeat inside a run, and every run is drawn fresh from the clock. The recipe stays the same: 2 analogies from each of the 6 relations, easy ones first (neighboring items may swap), which is what makes two of your runs worth comparing.
What counts as a good score?
We publish no norms for our version of verbal analogies, and anyone quoting a number for a browser test is guessing. Two things are worth knowing. 4 options mean about 3 of the 12 come from chance alone, and the cuts behind the word under your score sit at 11, 9 and 6 solved. Beyond that, the comparison worth making is with your own earlier runs.
12 analogies is a snapshot. The trend is the point.
In NEURA, verbal analogies are one task type inside a daily session of 20, picked for you each morning and pushed toward whatever you keep missing — and after three sessions the Focus Index opens, one score with a 14-day trend behind it. That is the part a single page cannot do.
