free tool, no sign-up
Fill in the Blank Generator
Create cloze activities by pasting a paragraph and selecting words to blank out. Perfect for reading comprehension, vocabulary practice, and classroom worksheets.
Enter a paragraph and click words to blank out,
then click "Generate Worksheet"
The Fill in the Blank Generator creates cloze activities—educational exercises where students complete a passage by filling in missing words. Simply paste any paragraph, click on the words you want to remove, and instantly generate a printable worksheet with blanks and an optional word bank. This technique reinforces reading comprehension, context clues, vocabulary retention, and understanding of grammar patterns. Teachers use cloze activities across all subjects, from language arts and science to history and foreign languages.
Paste a passage, click the words you want gone
Drop any paragraph into the text box and it reappears below as a row of clickable words. Click a word and it turns red; click it again and it comes back. A counter above the box tells you how many you have selected so far, which saves recounting a long passage. When you are happy, press Generate Worksheet and the blanks appear in the preview on the right.
There is no word list to type out and no template to fill in, which is what makes this quicker than building a cloze exercise by hand in a word processor. If you want to see how it behaves before pasting your own text, Load sample text drops in a short passage about the water cycle that you can practise on.
Punctuation is handled for you. Blank out a word that ends a sentence and the full stop stays on the page next to the blank rather than disappearing into it, so students are not left guessing where the sentence ends. Editing the paragraph afterwards clears the selections, so do your final proofread before you start clicking.
Word bank on or off, and what that changes
The word bank is a shuffled box of every word you removed, printed above the passage. It is on by default. With it showing, the task is matching and elimination: a supported reading exercise for younger classes, EAL learners, or a first pass at new vocabulary. The shuffle happens once each time you generate, so the answers never sit in the order they appear in the text.
Turn the word bank off and the same passage becomes a recall test. Nothing else changes, so a common approach is to print one copy with the bank for the first lesson and a second copy without it a week later as a retrieval check. The blanks themselves are a fixed-width ruled line rather than one sized to the missing word, which means the length of the line is not a clue.
The answer key and the colour coding
Above the preview there are two tabs: Worksheet and Answer Key. The Answer Key tab shows the passage intact with every word you removed highlighted in its own colour, cycling through twenty colours before repeating. On a passage with fifteen blanks that makes marking a matter of glancing down the page rather than rereading it.
Each tab prints separately, so you print the worksheet for the class and the key for yourself. The key drops the word bank and the name and date lines, since they are no use on your copy. If you are printing the key in colour, leave background graphics enabled in the print dialog, otherwise the highlights come out plain.
Printing and saving the finished sheet
Print opens the worksheet in a clean new tab set in Georgia at 18px with generous line spacing, sized for US Letter with room to write on the lines. A4 works too if you let the printer scale to fit. Name and Date lines sit at the foot of the student copy, and a small line notes it was created at atc21s.org.
Download Image saves the preview as a PNG at twice normal resolution, which is the option you want for a slide, a Google Classroom post, a printed revision pack or a worksheet you are assembling inside another document. Five themes, Classic, Ocean, Forest, Sunset and Lavender, change the colour of the title and border if you want the sheet to match the rest of a pack.
Where cloze activities earn their place
Cloze notes work in almost any subject because the source text is yours. Science teachers blank the technical terms in a summary of a process; history teachers remove dates, names and causal connectives; English teachers take out the adjectives or the connectives to make the sentence structure visible. In a modern language lesson, blanking only the verbs turns a reading passage into conjugation practice without writing a separate exercise.
A practical rule of thumb is to remove roughly one word in eight to ten and never two in the same clause, so there is always enough surrounding text left for a student to work from context. Blanking every second word turns a reading task into a guessing game. It also helps to avoid removing a word that appears elsewhere in the passage in the same form, since a word bank then has two plausible homes for it.
The same passage can be reused at two levels in one class: eight blanks with a word bank for students who need the support, fifteen without one for those who do not. Because the paragraph stays in the box, you only have to reselect and regenerate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this fill in the blank generator free?
Yes. There is no account, no sign-in and no limit on how many worksheets you make. Everything runs in your browser, so the passage you paste never leaves your device.
What is a cloze exercise?
A cloze exercise is a passage with words deliberately removed for the reader to supply. It tests comprehension and vocabulary in context rather than in isolation, because the surrounding sentences are the only clue to what belongs in each gap.
Can I choose exactly which words are blanked out?
Yes, and that is the only way words are removed here. Nothing is selected automatically, so you click each word you want to take out and nothing else disappears by accident.
Does it produce an answer key?
Yes. The Answer Key tab shows the full passage with your removed words highlighted in different colours, and it prints as its own separate sheet.
How many words should I blank out of a paragraph?
Around one in eight to ten is a good starting point for most classes. Fewer if the vocabulary is new, more if it is a revision task, and try not to leave two blanks in the same clause.
Can I hide the word bank to make it harder?
Yes, there is a Show or Hide Word Bank option next to the theme picker. Hiding it turns the same passage from a matching activity into a recall test.
Can I save the cloze worksheet as an image or PDF?
Download Image saves it as a high-resolution PNG. For a PDF, use Print and pick Save as PDF as the printer destination in the print dialog.
Does it work for subjects other than English?
Yes, since you supply the passage. Teachers use cloze notes for science processes, history summaries, and foreign language reading where only the verbs or articles are removed.