Which phrasal verbs should you learn first?
Start with the 25 below. In an analysis of the 100-million-word British National Corpus, Gardner and Davies (2007) identified 518,923 phrasal verb occurrences and found that just 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly a third of all phrasal verb use in English. Learning those 25 well is worth more than half-learning 200.
The ranking here follows the PHaVE List (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015), which ordered the 150 most frequent phrasal verbs using the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The definitions and examples are our own, written for learners rather than researchers.
| # | Phrasal verb | Most common meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | go on | to continue, or to happen | What's going on here? |
| 2 | pick up | to lift something, or collect someone | I'll pick you up at eight. |
| 3 | come back | to return | She came back an hour later. |
| 4 | come up | to arise or be mentioned | The subject came up at dinner. |
| 5 | go back | to return to a place or topic | Let's go back to your question. |
| 6 | find out | to discover information | I found out he'd already left. |
| 7 | come out | to become known, or to appear | The truth came out eventually. |
| 8 | go out | to leave home socially | We went out for dinner. |
| 9 | point out | to draw attention to something | She pointed out my mistake. |
| 10 | grow up | to become an adult | I grew up in Madrid. |
| 11 | set up | to establish or arrange | They set up a new company. |
| 12 | turn out | to end up a certain way | It turned out fine. |
| 13 | get out | to leave or escape | Get out of the car. |
| 14 | come in | to enter | Come in, the door's open. |
| 15 | take on | to accept work or responsibility | She took on two new clients. |
| 16 | give up | to stop trying, or quit a habit | Don't give up now. |
| 17 | make up | to invent, or to reconcile | He made up an excuse. |
| 18 | end up | to finish in a situation you didn't plan | We ended up walking home. |
| 19 | get back | to return, or to recover something | I got back late. |
| 20 | look up | to search for information | Look it up in the dictionary. |
| 21 | figure out | to work out or understand | I can't figure out this form. |
| 22 | sit down | to take a seat | Please sit down. |
| 23 | get up | to rise, especially from bed | I get up at six. |
| 24 | take out | to remove or extract | He took out his phone. |
| 25 | come on | to hurry, or to encourage | Come on, we're late. |
How many phrasal verbs do you actually need to know?
Far fewer than most lists imply. Gardner and Davies found that around 100 phrasal verbs account for more than half of all phrasal verb use in English. That is a realistic target — not the thousands you will see quoted elsewhere.
You will find claims online that English has "over 10,000 phrasal verbs" or that "natives use 160 for 85% of usage." We could not trace either figure to a source, and the pages repeating them contradict each other. What is documented is the shape of the distribution: a small number of very common phrasal verbs do most of the work, and the rest are rare.
One honest complication: those same 100 high-frequency phrasal verbs carry roughly 559 possible meaning senses between them. The verbs are few; the meanings are many. Which is why the next question matters more than the list itself.
Why is one meaning usually enough?
Because meanings are not evenly used. Garnier and Schmitt found that frequent phrasal verbs have an average of 5.6 different meanings — but most of those are rare and peripheral. Restricting each phrasal verb to just its dominant sense or two still covers over 75% of the times it appears in real English.
This is the single most useful finding for a learner, and almost no phrasal verb list reflects it. You do not need twelve meanings of "get up." You need one, plus the confidence to recognise an unusual use from context.
So the efficient order is: learn the most frequent verbs, in their most frequent meaning, first. Breadth of meaning comes later, and mostly comes free through reading and listening.
What CEFR level are phrasal verbs?
Cambridge's English Vocabulary Profile assigns CEFR levels to individual phrasal verbs based on the Cambridge Learner Corpus and exam wordlists. At the time of the study below it contained 439 phrasal verbs, distributed heavily toward the middle levels.
The pattern is worth noticing: phrasal verbs barely appear at A1 and A2. They are largely a B1 and B2 concern. If you are a beginner and phrasal verbs feel impossible, that is not a personal failing — they genuinely are not beginner vocabulary.
| CEFR level | Phrasal verbs in the EVP | What this tells you |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 4 | Almost none — get up, go out, wake up, come from |
| A2 | 27 | A small starter set of everyday actions |
| B1 | 145 | Where phrasal verbs really begin |
| B2 | 263 | The largest group — the B2 vocabulary jump is real |
| Total | 439 | Concentrated at B1–B2, not spread evenly |
Do those CEFR levels actually hold up?
Only partly — and this is worth knowing before you trust any "B1 phrasal verbs" list, including the ones that cite Cambridge.
Cambridge's own journal published a validation study that tested about 1,600 learners on 100 phrasal verbs from the EVP. A1 items were reliably easier than the rest. But between A2, B1 and B2 there was no significant difference in measured difficulty — the ranges overlapped, and some items were not ordered as the level labels suggested. One phrasal verb, "leave behind," was reclassified from A2 to B1 as a result.
The practical takeaway: treat CEFR levels for phrasal verbs as useful guidance about when they typically appear, not as a difficulty ladder to climb in order. Frequency is the more reliable guide to what to learn first, which is why the list above is ordered that way.
This is also why we report your level as a range rather than a single letter. If you want to know roughly where you sit, the free English level test takes about five minutes.
Are phrasal verbs separable or inseparable?
Some phrasal verbs let the object sit between the verb and the particle, and some do not. "Turn the light off" and "turn off the light" are both correct; "look after the children" cannot become "look the children after."
Two rules carry most of the load. First, when the object is a pronoun, a separable phrasal verb must split: "turn it off," never "turn off it." Second, three-part phrasal verbs — "look forward to," "get on with," "put up with" — never separate.
Beyond that, separability has to be learned per verb. It is one more reason to work through a short, high-frequency list properly rather than skim a list of 200.
How should you actually practise them?
In context, not in columns. A phrasal verb learned inside a sentence you understand is retained; the same verb memorised from a two-column table usually is not, because the meaning depends on how it is used.
A workable routine: take five from the list above, find each one in something you are already reading or watching, then review them over several days rather than in one sitting. Spacing the reviews is what moves them into long-term memory.
If you would rather not build this by hand, Nivelo's practice includes spaced-repetition flashcards and reading with click-to-translate, so phrasal verbs get reviewed on a schedule instead of forgotten. Start with the free level test to see where you are, or read more about what English level you need for work or study.