Phrasal verb

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A two-word verb, consisting of a verb and a "small" adverb or particle, that has an idiomatic meaning not easily predictable from the individual parts.

    "In 'The police told the driver to pull over', 'pull over' is a phrasal verb."

  2. 2
    an English verb followed by one or more particles where the combination behaves as a syntactic and semantic unit wordnet
  3. 3
    A phrase, consisting of a verb with a preposition and/or adverb, that has idiomatic meaning.

    "Thus, it would seem that as far as GAPPING is concerned, the whole expression put off is somehow treated as a single 'compound Verb'. But this is the very intuition which we encapsulated in analysis (125) (b), by giving the sequence [put off] the status of a single V constituent (i.e. by analysing it as a Phrasal Verb). Thus, facts about GAPPING lend yet further support to analysis (125)."

Synonyms

All synonyms
phrasal

Example

More examples

"In 'The police told the driver to pull over', 'pull over' is a phrasal verb."

Next best steps

Browse writing guidesExplore topic clusters