reluctant
Not wanting to do something.
- Priya was reluctant to leave the fair, dragging her feet all the way to the gate.
- The cat was reluctant to come in from the sunny windowsill, ignoring every single call.
Similar: unwilling, hesitant, slow
reluctant or scared?
Scared is about fear. Reluctant is simply not wanting to.
It is a very reasonable guess, because the two often turn up in the same situations — a child hanging back at the door could be either.
But reluctance needs no fear in it at all. Think of a child being called in from the garden: not frightened in the slightest, just not keen.
That is the whole distinction. Reluctant tells you about willingness; scared tells you about fear. A character can be reluctant about something they find completely safe and merely boring.
reluctant, in full
scared 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
The bank's synonyms are unwilling, hesitant and slow — none of them about fear. A child who reads reluctant as scared invents an emotion the writer never put there, which changes their answer to any question about how a character felt.
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