TOEFL Complete the Words: how it works and how to do well
Complete the Words gives you a short paragraph with letters missing from ten of its words, and you type the missing letters. It’s one of three Reading tasks on the TOEFL iBT since January 2026, and it checks how well you use grammar, vocabulary and meaning to put a text back together.
- Words to complete in a test
- 30
- Words per paragraph
- 10
- Words in a paragraph
- 70–100
- For each word
- 1 point
How Complete the Words works
You see one short paragraph on a general topic that needs no special knowledge. The first sentence is complete. After that, the second half of every second word is missing, until ten words have been cut.
Each missing letter has its own blank, so you always know how many letters to type. You see the first half of the word, rounded down, so the bigger half is the part that’s missing:
- thatshows asth (2 missing letters)
- andshows asa (2 missing letters)
- peopleshows aspeo (3 missing letters)
Short, everyday words are cut as often as harder ones: “is”, “from” and “that” are as likely to be missing as a long noun. The blanks fall in the first few sentences, so the end of the paragraph is usually left whole.
You’ll meet Complete the Words in both modules of the Reading section, 30 words in all. It has no timer of its own: it shares each module’s clock with the other Reading tasks. The first module is 18 to 21 minutes and the second is 9.
How it’s scored. Each word is one question, worth one point. A word counts only if every missing letter is right, so a word with one wrong letter earns nothing. A wrong answer costs you nothing more than that point, so never leave a word empty.
Try it
Try it yourself
This paragraph was written for this guide in the same format as the real task. Type the missing letters, and see how many of the ten you get.
Fill in the missing letters in the paragraph.
Bread is one of the oldest foods that people still bake and eat today. The fi breads we flat a quite ha because ea bakers d not kn how t make do rise. La, people learned that yeast, a tiny living thing, fills dough with small bubbles of gas. These bubbles make the bread soft and light. Today, bakers all around the world still use yeast in much the same way.
A word turns green as soon as it’s right.
How to work it out
- we (2 missing letters)The subject, “The first breads”, is plural and in the past, so the verb is were.
- a (2 missing letters)It joins two words describing the bread, flat and hard: and.
- t (1 missing letter)“know how __ make” needs to.
- do (3 missing letters)Something has to rise. If you’re not sure, keep reading: the next sentence says yeast “fills dough with small bubbles of gas”. So, dough.
- La (3 missing letters)The capital letter tells you a new sentence starts here, and the story moves forward in time: Later.
0/10 words
How to do well
Read the whole paragraph first. The first sentence gives you the topic, and the untouched end often repeats a word you need.
Let grammar narrow it down. Ask what kind of word fits: a verb after a subject, a noun after “the”, a past form when the sentence is in the past. Then check it agrees: one or many, now or then.
Count the blanks, then spell exactly. The missing half always includes the ending, so endings like -s, -ed and -ly are yours to get right. A word that fits the meaning but has the wrong number of letters is wrong.
Don’t get stuck. If a word won’t come, type your best guess and move on. An empty word scores nothing, and a guess might score.
Try Complete the Words in a real-format test
Reading Practice Test 1 has all three Reading tasks, timed and scored on the 1.0–6.0 band scale. Free, with no account needed.
Start Reading Practice Test 1