Phrasal verbs | Example uses | Definitions and Replacements |
Add up | James added up the number of affirmative responses. | calculate |
Buy out | The large company bought out the smaller. | purchase (someone’s assets) |
Buy up | The business’s assets were bought up in the auction. | purchase (all of something) |
Call off | The order was to call off the strike immediately. | cancel |
Carry on | The meeting will carry on in your absence. | continue |
Carry out | Sam carried out the research because Jimmy couldn’t find the time. | execute |
Cut out | Because the subsection was not directly relevant to the rest of the paper, Randal had to cut it out. | excise |
Find out | The purpose of the literature review is find out what has been said on the topic. | discover |
Get (it) over with (must be split) | Isa and the other participants were happy to get the laborious questionnaire over with. | complete |
Get across | Lars’s paper has too many grammatical mistakes, meaning he couldn’t get his message across. | communicate |
Give up | The outnumbered forces would not give up. | surrender |
Hold up | When deadlines approach, a student cannot let anything hold up the completion of an assignment. | delay |
Leave out | The witness left out a number of important details. | omit |
Make up | We asked participants to make up a scenario in which they would be content. | fabricate |
Make out | In the darkness he could not make out the size of the camp. | see |
Pass up | We could not pass up this opportunity to collaborate. | forgo |
Pass on | The common flu can be passed on through saliva. | transmit |
Pass out | Our research assistants passed out four-hundred surveys to a random sample of shoppers. | distribute |
Pick up | This study picks Dekker’s research up where he left it. | resume |
Point out | Hendriks (2010) points out that such a study might be useful. | explain |
Set up | The equipment’s sensitivity meant we had to set it up with utmost care. | arrange |
Turn down | Regretfully, the board must turn down a number of applicants every year. | reject |
Use up | The campers were thirsty after they used up the last of the water. | exhaust |
