Vocabulary Hub · Phrasal Verbs

Choose your particle path

Phrasal verbs are where English feels truly natural. Select a level and master them with interactive flip cards — meaning on one side, real usage on the other.

Phrasal verbs, level by level

See every phrasal verb as a clean reference list with meanings, examples and synonyms — or dive into the full 5,500-word vocabulary library, organised by CEFR level and topic.

All phrasal-verb lists → A1 A2 B1 B2 Full word library

Two minutes a day: the word game that trains spelling

Phrasal verbs are about meaning; our free daily English word game trains the other half — spelling and active recall. One hidden word a day at your CEFR level, a clue after three guesses, and the definition plus an example sentence at the end.

Play today’s word → B1 · 6 letters Which vocabulary games actually work?

Why these cards are grouped by situation

Most phrasal verb material is organised by particle: every verb with up in one chapter, every verb with out in the next. It looks tidy and it is close to the worst possible arrangement for memory. What you end up with is a dozen items that look almost identical, learned at the same moment, with nothing to distinguish them — so a week later you can recite the list and still have no idea whether the phone call was put off, put out or put through.

These 480 cards are grouped by situation instead: the verbs you need at an airport, the ones that come up in a meeting, the ones people use about money or arguments or relationships. Each category holds exactly ten, which is about as many of these as anyone absorbs in one sitting — a phrasal verb is a heavier item than an ordinary word, because you have to store two elements, their order, and where the object goes. Ten verbs met on five separate days will outlast forty met once, every time.

Working through a deck

The card is built around one idea: guess before you check. Everything below follows from that.

Guess the front before you flip

The face of the card shows only the verb, so you get one honest attempt at the meaning before help arrives. Failing that attempt is not wasted effort — the struggle to retrieve is what builds the pathway, which is why reading the meaning and the verb together feels productive and does so much less.
Read the example for the pattern, not the meaning

By the time you flip, you usually know roughly what it means. The example is there to show you something the definition cannot: where the object goes. Turn the light off tells you the verb separates; look after the children tells you it does not. That is the part you will get wrong in speech.
Play the audio at least twice

In natural speech the particle usually takes the stress, and that stress pattern is invisible on the page. It is a large part of why phrasal verbs are so much harder to catch in listening than in reading — hearing each one trains you to recognise it at conversational speed, not just on paper.
Save the ones that beat you

Send only the verbs you failed to guess to your deck. A review queue of thirty phrasal verbs you genuinely cannot recall gets reviewed; one of three hundred that includes everything you met gets abandoned inside a fortnight. Being ruthless here is what keeps the habit alive.

A five-day routine for ten verbs

Take one category — ten verbs — and give it a week. Day one: flip through all ten, guessing each before you check, and play the audio. Day two: go through the same ten from the meaning side, producing the verb from nothing; expect to fail half of them and let that happen. Day three: write one sentence for each of the five that beat you, using a real object and a situation from your own life, and check where the object sits. Day five: run the whole ten once more, which should take about two minutes. The following week: start a new category and put the old one into your review deck.

That is roughly twenty minutes across a week for ten verbs you keep, and at that rate the full 480 is a long project rather than an impossible one. The alternative — flipping through sixty cards in one evening because it feels like progress — reliably produces recognition without production, which is the state most learners are already stuck in.

Expect to understand more than you use

Every learner's receptive vocabulary is several times larger than their productive one, and the gap is wider for phrasal verbs than for anything else. That is normal and it is not a problem to be fixed by learning more verbs. It is fixed by using fewer of them more often: pick five a week, force them into real sentences about your own life, and let the rest sit in recognition until they come up naturally. Even very advanced speakers understand many multiples of what they actually say.

If you want the grammar behind the patterns — separable, inseparable, intransitive and three-part — the phrasal verbs reference pages set it out in full, along with the complete list for each level on one readable page.

Questions learners ask

Why are the cards grouped by situation instead of by particle?

Because grouping by particle causes interference. Studying every up verb together leaves you with a dozen similar-looking items competing in memory and no context to tell them apart, which is why learners who organise that way can recite the list and still not know which verb to use. Grouping by situation — the airport, the meeting, the argument — gives each verb a context to attach to, and context is what makes retrieval possible later.

How many phrasal verbs should I learn in one session?

Ten, which is why each category on this page holds exactly ten. A phrasal verb is a heavier item than an ordinary word — you have to remember two elements, their order, and where the object goes — so the number you can absorb in one sitting is lower than for vocabulary generally. Ten verbs, revisited across five short sessions, beats forty verbs met once.

What does the flip card actually show me?

The front shows the verb alone, so you get one honest attempt at recalling the meaning before help arrives. The back gives the meaning, an example sentence showing where the object sits, and synonyms — usually the single-word formal equivalent, which is what you would use in writing. The order is deliberate: guessing first and checking second is far more effective than reading both together, even though it feels less comfortable.

Should I use the audio?

Yes, and particularly for phrasal verbs. Stress placement carries meaning in these combinations and is invisible on the page — in natural speech the particle usually takes the stress, which is part of why phrasal verbs are so much harder to catch in listening than in reading. Hearing each one a few times trains you to recognise it at conversational speed rather than only on paper.

Can I use these phrasal verbs in formal writing?

Mostly not, and the synonyms on each card exist for exactly that reason. Academic and business writing prefers the single-word equivalent — establish rather than set up, tolerate rather than put up with, investigate rather than look into. Neither half of those pairs is more correct; knowing both is what lets you shift register on purpose instead of by accident.

How is this different from the phrasal verbs lists?

Same 480 verbs, different purpose. This page is the trainer: cards flip, audio plays, translation appears on tap, and the difficult ones save to your deck. The phrasal verbs list pages are static reference — the complete set for a level on one readable page, better for browsing, revising offline or sending someone a link. Learn here, revise there.