benevolent
Kind and wanting to do good things for other people.
- The benevolent king gave food to every hungry family in the village.
- The benevolent old lady next door bakes shortbread for everyone in the street.
Similar: kind, generous, caring
benevolent or kind?
Kind is how someone treats you. Benevolent is setting out to do good for people generally.
Kind is not wrong, it is just not the whole word — and in a paper that offers both, half right is wrong.
Kind describes how someone behaves towards the person in front of them. Benevolent goes further and describes an intention aimed at people at large, whether or not they are in the room.
A kind friend shares a biscuit with you. A benevolent one bakes for the whole street. That is why the word attaches itself to kings, charities and fairy godmothers — people with the power and the intention to do good on a scale.
benevolent, in full
kind is not one of the words we teach — it is a word your child already has. That is exactly why it is the one they reach for.
Why it costs marks
Benevolent turns up constantly in the kind of older fiction comprehension papers are drawn from, usually describing someone with power. Reading it as simply kind loses the scale the writer meant.
Definitions and example sentences on this page are the ones a child sees inside Wordrealm, taken from our list of over 1,100 words. It is free to browse, with nothing to sign up for.
Sitting the 11+ in Kent, Medway or Buckinghamshire?
Plain-English guides to each test, from the councils’ own pages: Kent Test · Medway Test · Bucks Secondary Transfer Test