Virtuous English AcademyEnglish Phrasal Verbs — Lists by Level
Phrasal verbs are the heart of natural, spoken English. These free lists cover 480 common phrasal verbs from A1 to B2, grouped by topic — each with a clear meaning, an example sentence and synonyms.
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What a phrasal verb is
A phrasal verb is an ordinary verb followed by a small word — a particle such as up, off, out or into — where the combination means something the two parts do not mean separately. Give means to hand over and up means towards a higher place, but give up means to stop trying. That gap is the whole difficulty. There is nothing in the parts to warn you what the whole will mean, and English has thousands of these combinations, many with several unrelated senses each: take off is what a plane does, what you do with a coat, and what a business does when it suddenly succeeds.
They are also unavoidable. Phrasal verbs are not decorative or slangy — they are what English uses instead of the formal single-word verb in almost all speech, and several of them (get up, go on, find out, look for) sit among the most frequent verbs in the language. A learner who avoids them is not speaking neutral English; they are speaking written English aloud, which is exactly the effect that makes an otherwise accurate speaker sound stiff. Learning them is not an advanced refinement. It is the difference between correct English and natural English.
Separable, inseparable and three-part verbs
Four patterns govern where the object goes. Getting them wrong is the most audible phrasal-verb error, and the one that a dictionary entry rarely warns you about.
Separable
The object can sit either after the particle or between the verb and the particle: turn off the light or turn the light off. The rule that catches everyone: if the object is a pronoun, it must go in the middle. Turn it off is correct; turn off it is not.
Inseparable
The verb and particle never come apart, whatever the object is: look after the children, look after them — never look the children after. Most combinations where the particle is really a preposition behave this way, and unfortunately nothing in the form tells you which kind you are looking at.
Intransitive
Some take no object at all, so the question of separation never arises: the car broke down, she grew up in Leeds, please sit down. A few verbs work both ways with different meanings, which is why the plane took off and he took his shoes off are the same verb doing quite different jobs.
Three-part
Verb plus two particles — put up with, look forward to, get on with, run out of. These are always inseparable and the object always follows the whole cluster: I cannot put up with it. They are among the most idiomatic combinations in English and among the most useful to know.
How to learn phrasal verbs without drowning in lists
The mistake nearly everyone makes is to study phrasal verbs by particle — all the up verbs together, then all the out verbs. It looks organised and it actively causes interference, because you end up with a dozen similar-looking items competing in memory and no context to tell them apart. Group them by situation instead, which is how these lists are arranged: the verbs you need at an airport, the ones that come up in a meeting, the ones people use about relationships. Learn each one inside a full sentence you would actually say, note whether it separates, and accept from the start that you will understand many more than you use. That asymmetry is normal even for very advanced speakers.
Questions learners ask about phrasal verbs
How many phrasal verbs are there in English?
Dictionaries of phrasal verbs typically list several thousand combinations, and counting senses rather than forms pushes the figure higher still, since a single combination like take up carries half a dozen distinct meanings. The reassuring part is the distribution: a few hundred account for the overwhelming majority of what you will actually hear, which is why these lists stop at 480 rather than chasing completeness.
Which phrasal verbs should I learn first?
The everyday ones tied to your daily routine — get up, wake up, put on, turn on, look for, go out. They are the most frequent, the most concrete and the least idiomatic, so they give the fastest return and the least confusion. The A1 list here is built from exactly that group; leave the abstract and idiomatic combinations until B1 and above.
How do I know if a phrasal verb is separable?
There is no reliable way to tell from the form, so it has to be learned with the verb. Two habits help. First, always record a new phrasal verb inside a full sentence with a real object, because the sentence preserves the pattern. Second, test it with a pronoun: if turn it off sounds right, the verb separates; if only look after it works, it does not.
Are phrasal verbs informal? Should I avoid them in writing?
They are neutral in speech and mostly informal in writing, which is a different thing from being wrong. Academic and business writing tends to prefer the single-word equivalent — establish rather than set up, tolerate rather than put up with, investigate rather than look into. Knowing both halves of those pairs is what lets you shift register deliberately instead of by accident.
Why can I understand phrasal verbs but never use them?
Because recognition is a far easier task than production, and the gap is wider for phrasal verbs than for ordinary words: you have to retrieve two elements, put them in the right order, and decide where the object goes. The fix is deliberate production practice — take five verbs a week and force yourself to use each one in a real sentence about your own life until the pattern stops needing thought.
What is the difference between a phrasal verb and an idiom?
A phrasal verb is a specific grammatical structure, verb plus particle, whereas an idiom is any fixed expression whose meaning is not the sum of its parts. The categories overlap heavily — most phrasal verbs are idiomatic, and some idioms are built around them — but plenty of idioms are not phrasal verbs at all: once in a blue moon and the last straw contain no verb-plus-particle combination.