English Quiz - Compound Words (Answers)
If you put two or more words together to make a new one, it is a compound word. For example: 'lighthouse' (light + house); 'mother-in-law' (mother + in + law) and 'post office' (post + office). The last word is an example of the so-called open form compound word: the two words are written separately to form a new word.
If you are unsure about whether a word should be one word, two separate words or hyphenated, the best thing you can do is look in a good dictionary, such as the Oxford English Dictionary or Collins. It's better than searching online as these dictionaries are authoritative and are very unlikely to make mistakes. It's also a handy thing to have in your collection of non-fiction books!
This topic is actually quite complicated; however, we'll stick to the common compound words in this 11-plus quiz.
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It looks like the soap has been left out of the bathroom!
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'little school' could be used to describe ANY of the other schools mentioned in the list. 'primary', 'secondary' and 'high' are specific and can't be used to describe each other. This might be a good way of deciding if a 'word' is an open form compound word or just two words written next to each other
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'reader' is not specific enough to make 'book reader' a compound word
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'day time' should be written as 'daytime'. This is one of the tricky things with compound words: is it two words or one word? D'oh!
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'fish hook' should be written as 'fishhook'
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'grand-mother' should be written as 'grandmother': no hyphen! It appears that this also applies to the following: grandma/pa/son/daughter/nephew/niece. It seems that only grand-aunt and grand-uncle take a hyphen
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'greenlight' should be written as 'green light'
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'heartattack' should be written as 'heart attack'
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'rail way' should be written as 'railway'
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'post man' should be written as 'postman'
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