Definition of phrasal verb Phrasal verb
phras•al verb
We found 3 definitions of phrasal verb from 3 different sources.
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What does phrasal verb mean?
WordNet
Noun |
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| phrasal verb - an English verb followed by one or more particles where the combination behaves as a syntactic and semantic unit; "`turn out' is a phrasal verb in the question `how many turned out to vote?'" |
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Wiktionary 
- phrasal verb (Noun)
A phrase, consisting of a verb and either or both of a preposition or adverb, that has idiomatic meaning.
Wikipedia 
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Phrasal verb is the name given to an English verb which is composed of two or three words. One verb is combined with a preposition (like "on, in, under)" or an adverb (like "up, down, away"). Sometimes a phrasal verb can have a meaning that is very different to the meaning of at least one of those two or three words separately. Some text books call these verbs multi-word verbs. Phrasal verbs are used more frequently in everyday speech than in formal, official writing or speaking.
"Maria didn't know the word, so she" looked it up "in the dictionary."
"Oh no, we've" run out of "milk! I'll have to buy some more."
"Farmers have to" get up "early in the morning."
"The rocket" took off "with a loud roar."
Often these phrasal verbs have a one-word equivalent in other languages.
In Spanish, to get up can be translated as "levantarse", in French as "se lever" etc.
Many students of English as a foreign language panic when they hear the term "phrasal verbs", but in fact phrasal verbs are just vocabulary to memorize, and not some strange, secret grammatical formula. In fact many native speakers of English do not know the term "phrasal verb" at all, even though they probably use them very often!
Types of phrasal verbs.
There are four different types of phrasal verbs.
Instead of "separate" or "separable", some text books use the word "split" or "splittable".
If you do not know if a phrasal verb is separable or inseparable ALWAYS use a noun or noun phrase and do not try to separate the verb
