Phrasal verbs

A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small word — a particle such as up, out, off or on — that together mean something different from the verb alone. For example, give up does not mean to give; it means to quit. English has thousands of them, and they are a normal, everyday part of natural speech.

Give up (to quit), look after (to take care of), put off (to postpone) and get up (to rise from bed) are common examples. Each is a verb plus a particle whose combined meaning you usually cannot guess from the two words separately — which is why they are worth learning as whole units.

The most common are built on everyday verbs: get up, take off, put on, look for, come back, go on, turn off and give up. This page groups over 100 of them by their base verb (get, take, put, look and so on), because learning them in families is far easier than one at a time.

Common ones include get up (rise from bed), get over (recover from), get by (manage), get through (finish or reach by phone), get along (have a good relationship) and get away (escape or take a break). Get forms more phrasal verbs than almost any other verb, so it is a good place to start.

Take off (leave the ground, or remove), take up (start a hobby), take over (gain control), take after (resemble a relative), take on (accept work) and take in (understand, or give shelter). Notice one phrasal verb can have more than one meaning — context tells you which.

With a separable phrasal verb the object can go in the middle: “turn the light off” or “turn off the light” (and a pronoun must split it: “turn it off”). With an inseparable one the object cannot split it: “look after them”, never “look them after”. When unsure, keep the two words together.

Learn them in groups by base verb, as this page does, and always with an example sentence — the sentence shows the meaning and the grammar together. Do not try to memorise a huge list at once; take one base verb at a time, use each phrasal verb in your own sentence, and test recall with the quiz.

Because the meaning is usually not guessable from the parts (“put up with” = tolerate), many have several meanings, and the grammar of separating them is fiddly. The fix is to treat each phrasal verb as a single vocabulary item, learn it in context, and meet it often — not to translate the words one by one.

English has several thousand, but a few hundred cover almost everything you will hear and use. Master the common ones built on get, take, put, look, come, go and turn first — the 100+ on this page — and wider reading will pick up the rest naturally.

Yes, and many do. Take off can mean a plane leaving the ground or removing clothing; make up can mean to invent a story or to become friends again after an argument. The surrounding words almost always make the intended meaning clear, so learn phrasal verbs inside example sentences.

Most are neutral to informal and are extremely common in everyday speech, which is why using them makes your English sound natural. In very formal writing a single-word synonym is sometimes preferred (postpone rather than put off), but in conversation and most writing, phrasal verbs are exactly what a native speaker uses.

A normal verb is one word (quit); a phrasal verb is a verb plus a particle whose combined meaning is new (give up). Many phrasal verbs have a one-word, often more formal, equivalent — but the phrasal version is usually the more natural choice in speech.

Not as a named task — the DET has no “phrasal verbs” section. But they matter across it: understanding them is essential for Interactive Listening and reading, and using them naturally lifts your Speaking and Writing, because they are how fluent English actually sounds. So this is vocabulary that feeds the test, not a DET drill.

They make you sound fluent and idiomatic rather than translated. Saying “I came up with an idea” instead of “I created an idea” reads as natural English, and natural, accurate range is exactly what the Production and Conversation subscores reward. Use them correctly, though — a misused phrasal verb stands out as much as a well-used one.

Build the vocabulary they sit inside: our English words with meaning list and the level lists (basic to advanced). It also helps to know the parts of speech, so you can see how the particle changes the verb.