The following is a list of commonly deployed phrasal verbs that find one use or another in academic texts. These (and others) can be acceptably used in academic texts. Along with these examples, however, are a number of one-word substitutions to illustrate that in each case the phrasal verb can be easily replaced.
Table of contents
As you look through the substitutions, be aware that phrasal verbs (like other verbs) often have more than one definition and more than one context of proper use.
This flexibility means that although these substitutions work for the examples given, and although the examples are common uses of phrasal verbs, a suggested replacement will not cover every possible use of its phrasal verb.
Separable
Note: If it uses a pronoun, the separable phrasal verb must be separated (e.g. “He added up the number” but “He added it up”).
Phrasal verbs | Example uses | Definitions and Replacements |
---|---|---|
Add up | James added up the number of affirmative responses. | calculate |
Buy out | The large company bought out the smaller. | purchase (someone’s assets) |
Buy up | The business’s assets were bought up in the auction. | purchase (all of something) |
Call off | The order was to call off the strike immediately. | cancel |
Carry on | The meeting will carry on in your absence. | continue |
Carry out | Sam carried out the research because Jimmy couldn’t find the time. | execute |
Cut out | Because the subsection was not directly relevant to the rest of the paper, Randal had to cut it out. | excise |
Find out | The purpose of the literature review is find out what has been said on the topic. | discover |
Get (it) over with (must be split) | Isa and the other participants were happy to get the laborious questionnaire over with. | complete |
Get across | Lars’s paper has too many grammatical mistakes, meaning he couldn’t get his message across. | communicate |
Give up | The outnumbered forces would not give up. | surrender |
Hold up | When deadlines approach, a student cannot let anything hold up the completion of an assignment. | delay |
Leave out | The witness left out a number of important details. | omit |
Make up | We asked participants to make up a scenario in which they would be content. | fabricate |
Make out | In the darkness he could not make out the size of the camp. | see |
Pass up | We could not pass up this opportunity to collaborate. | forgo |
Pass on | The common flu can be passed on through saliva. | transmit |
Pass out | Our research assistants passed out four-hundred surveys to a random sample of shoppers. | distribute |
Pick up | This study picks Dekker’s research up where he left it. | resume |
Point out | Hendriks (2010) points out that such a study might be useful. | explain |
Set up | The equipment’s sensitivity meant we had to set it up with utmost care. | arrange |
Turn down | Regretfully, the board must turn down a number of applicants every year. | reject |
Use up | The campers were thirsty after they used up the last of the water. | exhaust |
Inseparable
Phrasal verbs | Example uses | Definitions and Replacements |
---|---|---|
Back out of | Several subjects backed out of their treatment. | abandon |
Bear on | Foucault’s writings still bear on contemporary thought about prison. | influence |
Catch up with | It will take some time for our newer coal mines to catch up with our older ones. | equal |
Call on | I call on the work of other contemporary thinkers. | utilize |
Call for | The act of aggression called for immediate response. | necessitate |
Count on | The question is, should a citizen be able to count on its government to preserve free access to clean water? | rely on |
Cut down on | Practiced writers cut down on unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. | reduce |
Come up with | Hannah had to come up with a way to isolate the variable. | invent |
Fall apart | The board of directors fell apart. | disintegrate |
Get away | Several of them sought to get away from the cold winter night. | escape |
Get along with | They commonly exaggerated the degree to which the indigenous tribes would not get along with one another. | be friendly with |
Give in | After a long pause for thought, he gave in to the demands. | yield |
Go on | Bakker went on to win a prestigious award. | continue |
Hold on to | Sven tried everything, but could not hold on to his youth. | keep |
Hold out | Bram would hold out until morning when the supplies arrived. | wait |
Hold out on | Napoleon would not tolerate his generals holding out on him. | hide (something) |
Look into | We have a hypothesis, but we must look into other possible explanations for the phenomenon. | research |
Look out for | Among 50 respondents who regularly walk home from work in the middle of the night, 45 indicated looking out for criminals. | safeguard against |
Make sure of | To print the name of interviewee, an author must make sure of the interviewee’s consent. | ensure |
Pick up on | The data show various relationships that we had not picked up on. | notice |
Put up with | The country will put up with a certain number of economic sanctions. | tolerate |
See to | The custodian would see to the security of the building. | arrange |
Take after | This new state takes after its regional neighbours. | resemble |
Touch on | At the beginning of his speech, Finn found it necessary to touch on the circumstances of the event. | mention |
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A phrasal verb is a verb that is made up of a main verb together with an adverb or a preposition, or both. Typically, their meaning is not obvious from the meanings of the individual words themselves. For example:
She has always looked down on me.
Fighting broke out among a group of 40 men.
I’ll see to the animals.
Phrasal Verbs List With Examples
Don’t put me off, I’m trying to concentrate.
The report spelled out the need for more staff.
For instance, in the first example, the phrasal verb ‘to look down on someone’ doesn’t mean that you are looking down from a higher place at someone who is below you; it means that you think that you are better than someone.
Transitivity
Phrasal verbs can be intransitive (i.e. they have no object):
We broke up two years ago.
They set off early to miss the traffic.
He pulled up outside the cottage.
or transitive (i.e. they can have an object):
The police were called to break up the fight.
When the door is opened, it sets off an alarm.
They pulled the house down and redeveloped the site.
Word order
The verb and adverb elements which make up intransitive phrasal verbs are never separated:
✓ We broke up two years ago.
✗ We broke two years ago up.
The situation is different with transitive verbs, however. If the direct object is a noun, you can say:
✓ They pulled | the house | down. |
[direct object] | ||
✓ They pulled down the house. |
If the object is a pronoun (such as it, him, her, them) , then the object always comes between the verb and the adverb:
✓ They pulled | it | down. |
[direct object] | ||
✗ They pulled down it. |
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A phrasal verb is a type of compound verb made up of a verb (usually one of action or movement) and a prepositional adverb—also known as an adverbial particle. Phrasal verbs are sometimes called two-part verbs (e.g., take off and leave out) or three-part verbs (e.g., look up to and look down on).
There are hundreds of phrasal verbs in English, many of them (such as tear off, run out [of], and pull through) with multiple meanings. Indeed, as linguist Angela Downing points out, phrasal verbs are 'one of the most distinctive features of present-day informal English, both in their abundance and in their productivity' (English Grammar: A University Course, 2014). Phrasal verbs often appear in idioms.
According to Logan Pearsall Smith in Words and Idioms (1925), the term phrasal verb was introduced by Henry Bradley, senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Examples and Observations
Mignon McLaughlin
'What you can't get out of, get into wholeheartedly.'
William Shakespeare
'Put out the light, and then put out the light.'
Frank Norris
'I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth.'
K.C. Cole
'Clots of excited children egged each other on, egged on their parents, egged on the blue-haired ladies and the teenage lovers and janitor who put down his mop to play.'
Joseph Heller
'Major Major had never played basketball or any other game before, but his great, bobbing height and rapturous enthusiasm helped make up for his innate clumsiness and lack of experience.'
The Semantic Coherence of Phrasal Verbs
Laurel J. Brinton
Best pc football simulation game. 'Like compounds, phrasal verbs have semantic coherence, evidenced by the fact that they are sometimes replaceable by single Latinate verbs, as in the following:
Furthermore, the meaning of the combination of verb and particle in the phrasal verb may be opaque, that is, not predictable from the meaning of the parts.'
– The Structure of Modern English: A Linguistic Introduction. John Benjamins, 2000)
- break out: erupt, escape
- count out: exclude
- think up: imagine
- take off: depart, remove
- work out: solve
- put off: delay
- egg on: incite
- put out: extinguish
- put off: postpone
Phrasal Verbs With Up
Ben Zimmer
'[P]hrasal verbs with up have filled a wide variety of roles in both British and American English. Up gets used for literal upward movement (lift up, stand up) or more figuratively to indicate greater intensity (stir up, fire up) or completion of an act (drink up, burn up). It’s particularly handy for blunt imperatives calling for resolute action: think of wake up!, grow up!, hurry up! and put up or shut up!'
– 'On Language: The Meaning of ‘Man Up.' The New York Times Magazine, September 5, 2010
Phrasal Verbs and Prepositional Verbs
'A phrasal verb differs from a sequence of a verb and a preposition (a prepositional verb) in [these] respects. Here call up is a phrasal verb, while call on is only a verb plus a preposition:
(R.L. Trask, Dictionary of English Grammar. Penguin, 2000)
(R.L. Trask, Dictionary of English Grammar. Penguin, 2000)
- The particle in a phrasal verb is stressed: They called up the teacher, but not *They called on the teacher.
- The particle of a phrasal verb can be moved to the end: They called the teacher up, but not *They called the teacher on.
- The simple verb of a phrasal verb may not be separated from its particle by an adverb: *They called early up the teacher is no good, but They called early on the teacher is fine.'
Also Known As: compound verb, verb-adverb combination, verb-particle combination, two-part verb, three-part verb