Fill in the Missing Letters — free practice
The 2026 TOEFL Reading section opens with a short academic paragraph of about 60 to 70 words in which ten words are missing roughly half of their letters. You restore each word from context, grammar, and word endings, and one paragraph can count as ten scored items. Every set below runs in the browser with a timer and instant checking.
Fill in the Missing Letters looks like a spelling task, but it isn't one. About half the letters of ten words are removed from a short academic paragraph, and the only way to recover them is to read what the sentence needs — the grammar, the word family, and the idea the paragraph is building.
It sits at the very front of the 2026 Reading section, and a single paragraph can count as ten scored items. That makes it one of the cheapest places on the test to gain points, and one of the most expensive places to lose them by rushing.
The slot tells you more than the letters do. If the word sits after "the" and before a verb, you need a noun; if it follows "are" it is probably an adjective or a participle. Fixing the form first removes most of the wrong candidates immediately.
Academic paragraphs lean on a small set of suffixes — tion, ment, ence, ical, ize, ively. Once you know the part of speech and the stem, the ending is usually forced, so count the empty boxes and check whether a familiar suffix fits exactly.
The word that resolves a blank often appears later in the sentence or in the next one, because these paragraphs define a term and then restate it. Finish reading before you commit, and come back to any word you had to guess.