Verbal Reasoning and Verbal IQ

What is verbal reasoning?

Verbal reasoning means reasoning with words. GL Assessment, which writes many of the UK's 11+ entrance tests, defines it this way: "Verbal Reasoning (VR) mainly involves reasoning with words. This includes the production of words, use of words and relationships between words" (GL Assessment, verbal reasoning parent's guide). In job and university admissions tests the emphasis shifts to written arguments: SHL describes its verbal test as measuring "a candidate's ability to evaluate written statements", where "the candidate is required to draw conclusions from the written evidence" (SHL Verify fact sheet).

Put together, a simple verbal reasoning definition is the ability to understand, analyse and draw logical conclusions from information expressed in words. Typical tasks include:

• Analogies: bird is to nest as bee is to … (hive).
• Similarities: how are a poem and a painting alike?
• Word relationships: opposites, synonyms and words that fit two meanings.
• Codes and hidden words: letter puzzles that use words as symbols.
• Reading and deduction: deciding whether a statement is true, false or can't be known from a passage.

Verbal reasoning, verbal comprehension and verbal intelligence

The three terms overlap, but they are not the same. The APA Dictionary of Psychology has no entry for verbal reasoning itself, but it does define the other two:

Verbal reasoning sits between two broad abilities. Knowing what words mean is crystallized intelligence, knowledge built up through reading and school. Working out a new relationship between words is closer to fluid intelligence, reasoning on the spot. Our guide to fluid vs crystallized intelligence explains the difference. The newest adult IQ test reflects this mix: alongside its Verbal Comprehension Index, the WAIS-5 offers an optional Verbal Reasoning Index that combines two verbal subtests with Set Relations, a fluid reasoning task (Pearson, WAIS-5 ancillary index scores).

What is verbal IQ?

Verbal IQ is short for verbal intelligence quotient. The APA defines it as "a broad measure of verbal ability as obtained on standardized intelligence tests and affected by native verbal skills, experience, education, test taking skills, and test motivation" (APA Dictionary). That list is a fair warning: a verbal score reflects what you have had the chance to learn, and how you felt on the day, as well as ability.

For most of the 20th century, Wechsler tests gave two IQs, verbal and performance (non-verbal), alongside the full scale IQ. The term is still widely used, but the tests have moved on:

1. 1939The Wechsler-Bellevue scale, the first Wechsler test, splits its tasks into verbal and performance halves.
2. 1955The first WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale), followed by the WAIS-R in 1981 and the WAIS-III in 1997.
3. 2008The WAIS-IV drops Verbal IQ and Performance IQ. "Verbal IQ (VIQ) and Performance IQ (PIQ) are no longer provided", replaced by index scores, including the Verbal Comprehension Index (Canivez, 2010).
4. 2014The children's WISC-V reports five primary indexes, with verbal comprehension the first.
5. 2024The WAIS-5. Its Verbal Comprehension Index uses Similarities and Vocabulary, with Information and Comprehension as extra verbal subtests.

Sources: Pearson, Introducing the WAIS-IV (2008); Canivez (2010); Pearson WAIS-5 overview and WISC-V product information.

So when someone today talks about their "verbal IQ", they usually mean the Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI). Its two core subtests are:

• Similarities: say how two words or ideas are alike. The APA describes a similarities test as one in which "the participant must either state the likenesses between items or arrange items in categories according to their similarities" (APA).
• Vocabulary: explain what words mean, starting with everyday words and moving to rare ones.

Both formats are old. Vocabulary items first appeared on an intelligence test in Alfred Binet's original test of 1905, and Binet had proposed a similarities task as early as 1895 (Gibbons and Warne, 2019). Our guide to the Wechsler IQ test describes the other four index scores.

What is a good verbal IQ score?

The VCI uses the same scale as IQ: an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 (Canivez, 2010). So a verbal score can be read exactly like an IQ score.

Percentages from the normal curve with mean 100 and SD 15. Each score links to its own page.

What does a high verbal IQ mean?

Pearson's description of high scores on the WISC-V's broad verbal index is a good summary: they "indicate strong crystallized abilities, a well-developed verbal reasoning system and fund of acquired general factual and practical knowledge", along with "strong word knowledge acquisition, effective information retrieval, good ability to reason and solve verbal problems, and effective communication of learned material" (Pearson, WISC-V Technical Report 1).

The balance between verbal and maths ability matters too. In a study of 2,409 young people who scored in the top 1% at age 13 and were followed for 25 years, the "tilt" of their scores predicted where they made their mark: those strongest verbally leaned towards the humanities and writing, those strongest in maths towards science and patents (Park, Lubinski and Benbow, 2007). Lists of "signs of a high verbal IQ" that circulate online, such as overthinking or sarcasm, have no research behind them.

What if your verbal and non-verbal scores are far apart?

That is common, and not a problem in itself. Pearson's WAIS-IV manual says a statistically significant gap "may not indicate that there is a clinically significant difference", and that the base rate, how often the gap occurs in the norm sample, should be considered, citing the guideline that gaps seen in fewer than 15% of the norm sample count as unusual (WAIS-IV Technical and Interpretive Manual). In one of Pearson's sample reports, a 22-point gap between verbal comprehension (145) and perceptual reasoning (123) was statistically significant, yet 5.7% of people show a gap that size. A big split describes how someone thinks; it is not a diagnosis.

Free verbal reasoning test: 9 practice questions

This short verbal reasoning test has nine questions in the formats you will meet in IQ tests, 11+ papers, admissions tests and job assessments. These are our own examples written in the style of each format, not real test items.

The golden rule for "true, false or cannot say": use only what the passage says. If it neither confirms nor contradicts the statement, the answer is "cannot say", even when the statement sounds likely. SHL, which publishes many workplace tests, asks candidates to decide "whether each statement is true or false, or whether you cannot say, given the information in the passage" (SHL).

Verbal reasoning tests you might take

Verbal logical reasoning is the name sometimes given to argument-based questions. The LSAT's Logical Reasoning section, for example, asks test takers to "critically evaluate arguments as they occur in ordinary language", including "detecting assumptions made by particular arguments" and "identifying flaws in arguments" (LSAC).

Our own free IQ test is mostly non-verbal. Its logical reasoning section uses a few simple word analogies and deductions, but it has no vocabulary section, so it says more about fluid reasoning than about verbal knowledge. For the non-verbal side of reasoning, see our guides to abstract reasoning and spatial reasoning.

What research shows about verbal ability

• It is closely tied to general intelligence. In an analysis of the WAIS-IV's 2,200-person norm sample, Vocabulary had one of the highest loadings on the general factor, 0.70, second only to Arithmetic at 0.74 (Canivez and Watkins, 2010).
• It peaks late. Vocabulary was among the last abilities to peak: around 50 in the Wechsler norms and around 65 in data from tens of thousands of people tested online (Hartshorne and Germine, 2015).
• Men and women hardly differ. Across 165 studies, the average gap was d = 0.11 in favour of women, and on vocabulary just 0.02, so small that the authors argued gender differences in verbal ability "no longer exist" (Hyde and Linn, 1988).
• Reading may feed intelligence. In 1,890 pairs of identical twins tested from age 7 to 16, the twin who read better early on tended to score higher on later intelligence tests, and the link was "not restricted to verbal cognitive domains" (Ritchie, Bates and Plomin, 2015). Keith Stanovich's famous idea of "Matthew effects", that good readers pull further ahead, remains a hypothesis: later researchers argued the widening gap is hard to test with current measures (Stanovich, 1986; Protopapas and others, 2016).
• Verbal and maths skills are only partly linked. On the GRE, verbal and quantitative scores correlate 0.44 (ETS), which is why a strong reader can still find maths hard, and the other way round.

How to improve verbal reasoning

Verbal ability is one of the most trainable sides of intelligence, because so much of it is knowledge.

• Read widely and often. Reading builds vocabulary and background knowledge, the raw material of every verbal test, and the twin study above suggests it may lift reasoning more broadly.
• Keep learning. A meta-analysis of more than 600,000 people found that each extra year of education raised intelligence test scores by about 1 to 5 IQ points, on every broad ability studied (Ritchie and Tucker-Drob, 2018).
• Practise the format. 11+ and job tests use question types few people meet elsewhere. GL Assessment provides free familiarisation papers because children "may not have encountered these types of questions before".
• Read the question, not your assumptions. In passage-based tests, most mistakes come from using outside knowledge. Mark only what the text proves.
• Learn to name categories. In similarities questions, the strongest answer usually names the category both things belong to ("both are works of art"), not a surface feature they share.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• American Psychological Association, APA Dictionary of Psychology: verbal comprehension, verbal intelligence, verbal IQ, verbal test, similarities test.
• GL Assessment. 11+ free familiarisation materials (verbal reasoning parent's guide and practice booklet); 11+ FAQs.
• SHL. Verify Verbal Reasoning fact sheet; verbal reasoning example questions.
• Pearson. WAIS-5 overview; A guide to WAIS-5 ancillary index scores; Introducing the WAIS-IV (2008); WISC-V Technical Report 1; WAIS-IV Technical and Interpretive Manual (excerpt).
• Canivez, G. L. (2010). Review of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Fourth Edition. The Eighteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook, Buros Institute.
• Canivez, G. L. and Watkins, M. W. (2010). Investigation of the factor structure of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV): exploratory and higher order factor analyses. Psychological Assessment, 22(4), 827–836.
• Gibbons, A. and Warne, R. T. (2019). First publication of subtests in the Stanford-Binet 5, WAIS-IV, WISC-V, and WPPSI-IV. Intelligence, 75, 9–18.
• Park, G., Lubinski, D. and Benbow, C. P. (2007). Contrasting intellectual patterns predict creativity in the arts and sciences. Psychological Science, 18, 948–952.
• UCAT test format, UCAT Consortium.
• ETS. GRE Guide to the Use of Scores, 2026–27.
• LSAC. LSAT Logical Reasoning.
• Hartshorne, J. K. and Germine, L. T. (2015). When does cognitive functioning peak? Psychological Science, 26(4), 433–443.
• Hyde, J. S. and Linn, M. C. (1988). Gender differences in verbal ability: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 104(1), 53–69.
• Ritchie, S. J., Bates, T. C. and Plomin, R. (2015). Does learning to read improve intelligence? A longitudinal multivariate analysis in identical twins from age 7 to 16. Child Development, 86(1), 23–36.
• Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360–407.
• Protopapas, A., Parrila, R. and Simos, P. G. (2016). In search of Matthew effects in reading. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 49(5), 499–514.
• Ritchie, S. J. and Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2018). How much does education improve intelligence? A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1358–1369.