Verbal Reasoning Odd One Out

An Odd One Out question prints five words. Three of them go together, and you find the two that do not.

So do not hunt the odd ones. Hunt the three. Hunting the odd ones means judging how strange a word looks. Hunting the three means naming a label. A label you can prove.

The method

Five beats: cover it and read five, find three, say the sentence and shrink it, name the pair, start again if it is missing.

1. Cover the option pairs with your hand, then read all five words. Nearly every wrong option holds a word from the real three. Reading them first plants a false group. Read all five before you decide anything: the first odd-looking word is not evidence.
2. Find the three that share one label. Say it out loud. "Tulip, daisy and rose are all flowers."
3. Say the whole sentence, and shrink the label until it fits. "Tulip, daisy and rose are all flowers, and a kettle and a ladder are not." If the label fits the two you are rejecting as well, it is too big. Shrink it until exactly three words fit. If you cannot finish that sentence, you have not found the answer.
4. Name your pair out loud, then uncover the options.
5. Find that exact pair. If it is not there, your three are wrong. Go back to step 2. Never take the closest-looking option.

About 35 to 40 seconds each.

Some papers ask for just one odd word out of four or five. Same beats: find the group, and the leftover is your answer.

Two things the question promises you

• Exactly three go together. Not four. A label that catches four is too big.
• Your pair sits in exactly one option. A pair you cannot find is wrong. That check is free.

What the three can share

• A kind of thing. Flowers, months, metals, birds.
• A place they belong. On water. In the sea. On your leg.
• A meaning. This is what the hardest questions are made of. Glance, stare and gaze are ways of looking. Tug, haul and drag are ways of pulling. Furious, enraged and livid are ways of being angry. Read doing words for what they do, not for what they are about.

The questions get harder in one exact way. The easy ones drop in a word from another world, like a spade among rain, snow and hail. The hard ones give five words that all share one big label. The real group is a smaller label inside it.

Gold, tin, copper, chalk and bamboo are all materials, and only three are metals.

Nearly every one of these is about meaning. If meaning gives you nothing after twenty seconds, check the kind of word. Are three of them doing words?

Watch for these traps

• A pair with one real outsider in it. Much the most common. Every question offers three or four, because half right looks right. Tulip and kettle. Check that both your words are outside the group.
• A pair that goes together beautifully — inside the group. Glance and gaze. Tug and drag. Tiny and miniature. Crimson and maroon. They look like the strongest pair on the page. That is the problem. They are two of your three.
• A label that is too big. "They are all vehicles" is true and decides nothing. A true label feels like success. Shrink it until one falls out.
• Picking the word you do not know. Under pressure a strange word feels wrong. But in these questions the strange word is usually one of the three. Gecko. Livid. Amble. Canter. Strange is not odd.
• Stopping when you have found one outsider. Spotting one feels like finishing. You need both, together, in one option.

Try these yourself

Now have a go yourself — tap the pair that don't belong.

Related

• The complete 11+ question-type guide
• VR: Closest Meaning — the skill behind the hardest groups, where the label is a meaning
• NVR: Odd One Out — the same hunt, done on shapes instead of words

All example questions come from the Brainblox question bank — practise this question type inside 15 arcade games, timed mock exams and focused practice. Brainblox is an independent app: not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by any exam board, school or assessment publisher, and it contains no past papers.