Phrasal Verbs

Snapshot

• A phrasal verb is a verb + particle (preposition/adverb) whose meaning is often not the sum of its parts — give up = quit, put off = postpone, look after = take care of.
• CUET tests them by giving a sentence and asking for the meaning of the phrasal verb, or asking you to fill a gap with the right particle. The challenge is that one verb (put, get, take, look) forms many different phrasal verbs by changing the particle.
• The smart approach is to group phrasal verbs by their base verb and learn the meaning each particle gives, plus learn the highest-frequency ones as fixed items.
• Exam reality: +5 / −1. Recognise the phrasal verb, recall its idiomatic meaning, and never read it literally.

Part 1 — High-frequency CUET phrasal verbs

Part 2 — Group by base verb (one verb, many meanings)

PUT: put off (postpone), put up with (tolerate), put up (accommodate/build), put down (suppress/insult), put on (wear), put out (extinguish), put forward (propose). GET: get along (relate well), get over (recover from), get away (escape), get by (manage), get through (finish/pass), get up (rise). TAKE: take after (resemble), take over (assume control), take off (remove/leave ground), take up (start a hobby), take in (deceive/absorb), take down (write/dismantle). LOOK: look after (care for), look into (investigate), look up to (admire), look down on (despise), look forward to (anticipate), look out (be careful). BREAK: break down (collapse), break up (end a relationship), break out (escape/erupt), break in (enter forcibly), break off (end abruptly).

Learning in these families means a single new particle unlocks several verbs at once, and you can often reason an unfamiliar phrasal verb from the particle's usual force.

Part 3 — What each particle tends to add

• up — completion or increase: finish up, eat up, speak up, build up.
• down — reduction or recording: calm down, write down, cut down, break down.
• off — separation or cancellation: call off, take off, cut off, put off.
• out — completion, extinguishing, or emerging: find out, put out, run out, break out.
• on — continuation: carry on, go on, hold on.
• over — transfer or review: take over, hand over, go over.
• in/into — entering or examining: break in, look into, give in. These are tendencies, not laws — but they help you guess sensibly when memory fails.

Part 4 — Worked examples

1. "The meeting was put off." → postponed.
2. "I can't put up with this noise." → tolerate.
3. "He takes after his mother." → resembles.
4. "The plan fell through." → failed.
5. "Police will look into the matter." → investigate.
6. "She brought up three children." → raised.
7. "They did away with the old law." → abolished.
8. "We ran out of milk." → exhausted the supply of.
9. "He turned down the job." → rejected.
10. "Students look up to their teacher." → admire / respect.

Part 5 — Common traps

• Literal reading — put off is not "place at a distance"; it is "postpone".
• Wrong particle — look after (care for) vs look into (investigate) vs look up to (admire). The particle changes everything.
• Close pairs — take after (resemble) vs take over (control); put up (accommodate) vs put up with (tolerate).
• Separable vs not — "turn the offer down" / "turn down the offer" both fine; but "look after her" cannot become "look her after".
• Same verb, opposite feel — look up to (respect) vs look down on (despise).

Part 6 — Why phrasal verbs reward grouping

A flat list of three hundred phrasal verbs is almost impossible to retain, but the same three hundred organised by base verb and by particle become a structured, learnable system. When you see break out in "war broke out", you can reason: break = sudden rupture, out = emerging, so it means "erupt/begin suddenly" — and the same logic gives break out in a rash or a fire broke out. This is why grouping beats rote learning: it turns memory into reasoning. At the same time, the most frequent forty or fifty (the Part 1 table) deserve fixed memorisation because they recur constantly and a few of them — put up with, look forward to, do away with — are three-word units whose meaning you simply must know. Build your study in two layers: memorise the high-frequency list cold, and learn the verb-families and particle-meanings to handle anything unexpected. In the exam, if a phrasal verb is unfamiliar, do not panic — read the whole sentence for tone, recall what the particle usually adds, and reject the literal option, which is almost always the planted wrong answer.

Part 7 — More high-value phrasal verbs (extend your bank)

Part 8 — Why one verb spawns a dozen meanings

The reason phrasal verbs feel overwhelming is that English builds enormous flexibility from a few small verbs and a few small particles — get, put, take, look, come, go combined with up, down, in, out, on, off, over, away. A single verb like get yields get up, get over, get by, get along, get through, get away, get at, get on, each idiomatic. Trying to memorise these as unrelated facts is exhausting; instead, anchor each particle's flavour (Part 3) and let it modify the verb. Get roughly means "reach a state"; add over (across/past) and you get "recover from"; add by (alongside) and you get "manage"; add through (to the end) and you get "finish or survive". You will not always be able to reason perfectly — idioms drift from their parts — but reasoning gets you close enough to reject the literal distractor and pick the best option. Combine this with rote-learning the fifty most frequent forms, and you cover both the common questions and the surprises. One last exam tip: when a phrasal verb appears in a sentence, the subject and object often reveal the meaning — "the medicine wore off" (a feeling fading) cannot mean the same as "she wore a coat", so let the surrounding nouns guide you to the idiomatic sense.

Part 9 — How to use this page

Memorise the Part 1 and Part 7 high-frequency tables, then study the verb-families in Part 2 and the particle-meanings in Part 3 so you can reason out unfamiliar ones. Drill the close pairs in Part 5 that the exam loves to confuse, and practise with sentence-based questions, always reading the phrasal verb in its full sentence.

One-line revision: a phrasal verb's meaning is idiomatic, not literal — memorise the frequent ones, group the rest by base verb and particle, and always reject the literal-meaning distractor.