Phrasal verbs

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A phrasal verb, like make up or give away, is an idiomatic phrase consisting of a verb and a particle. The words in such phrases usually have different meanings in other contexts, but when they form a phrasal verb they mean something together. If you make up a story, you invent it; if you give a secret away, you reveal it.
Children often take after their parents.
There are lots of phrasal verbs in English. Every day we wake up and get up. We put on and take off coats, shoes or glasses. We switch on lights, the TV, and our mobile phones – and then we switch them off.
The two parts of some phrasal verbs may appear together or separated in a sentence:
Please turn off your mobile phone.
Please turn your mobile phone off.
But sometimes they have to be separated – when the object of the verb is a pronoun:
You can’t use your mobile phone here. Please turn it off.

Like many other words, some phrasal verbs have more than one meaning. If you pick up a language, you learn it, but if you pick up an illness, you catch it. You can collect or pick somebody up in your car. When you answer a phone call, you pick up. And when the weather picks up, it improves. Luckily, good dictionaries provide plenty of examples to make the different meanings clear.

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