A search for pair production of top squark events in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of √s = 8 TeV is performed in a sample with a single isolated electron or muon, jets, large missing transverse energy and large transverse mass. The data sample used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb−1 collected by the CMS experiment. No significant excess in data is observed above the expectation from standard model processes. In the context of supersymmetric models with pair production of top squarks decaying to either a top quark and the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) or a bottom quark and a chargino that subsequently decays to a W boson and the LSP, the results probe top squarks with masses up to about 650 GeV for LSP masses up to about 250 GeV.