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Phrasal verbs with more than one meaning
By Liz Walter

Phrasal verbs are often difficult to learn because they tend to be formed from fairly common verbs and particles. To make matters worse, many of them have more than one meaning, and some have many, many meanings – “pick up” has 24 senses in the Cambridge Phrasal Verbs Dictionary!

Look at these sentences with “go out,” for example:
+ Did you go out last night? (leave your home for a social activity)
+ The fire’s gone out. (stopped burning)
+ The tide will go out at around 6 today. (go away from the shore)

However, the situation isn’t quite as bad as it may seem at first glance. For a start, many senses that look different are in fact connected in a figurative or metaphorical way. For instance, although these senses of “break down” would be treated as separate meanings in most dictionaries, we can see that they are all connected with the idea of a thing or a person not functioning correctly:
+ My car broke down. (stopped moving)
+ Talks between the two groups broke down. (ended in failure)
+ She broke down when we told her the news. (started crying and couldn’t control her emotions)

Secondly, different meanings often have a different syntax, by which I mean they are connected in different ways to the words around them. For example, there are several common phrasal verbs that have different meanings depending on whether they are transitive (have an object) or intransitive (do not have an object). Look at the following pairs:
+ You can look up the words in your dictionary. (transitive: find information in a book or on a computer)
+ We’ve had a hard time, but things are looking up now. (intransitive: improving)
+ He took off his coat. (transitive: removed it)
+ The plane took off. (intransitive: left the ground)

Another thing that often helps to distinguish different meanings of a phrasal verb is the type of object it takes, especially whether the object is a thing or a person, as in these pairs of meanings:
+ She brought up her children alone. (looked after them until they were adults)
+ Rex brought up the subject of finance. (mentioned it)
+ We had to put the meeting off until the following week. (arrange something for a later time)
+ I was going to go running, but the bad weather put me off. (made me not want to go)

And what about monster phrasal verbs like “pick up”? Well, some of those 24 senses are very rare, and while you may want to look them up if you come across them in a text, you probably won’t miss them if they’re not in your active vocabulary. However, the following two meanings are very common, so I recommend that you start with them:
+ I asked Dad to pick me up from the station. (collect me in his car)
+ He picked up the gun. (lifted it in his hand)