| a combination of verb and one or more adverbial or prepositional particles, as catch on, take off, bring up, or put up with, functioning as a single semantic unit and often having an idiomatic meaning that could not be predicted from the meanings of the individual parts. |
| phrasal verb n. An English verb complex consisting of a verb and one or more following particles and acting as a complete syntactic and semantic unit, as look up in She looked up the word in the dictionary or She looked the word up in the dictionary. |