How to learn phrasal verbs: why "went with" means "chose" — and why up, out, off and down aren't random

A reader report: "went with doesn't mean choose"

This is a Part 2 item from our question bank. The question:

Which vendor did we choose for the office furniture?

Of the three responses, the correct one is (B) We went with Oakridge Interiors.

A reader reported: 「went with 不是選擇的意思」 — "went with doesn't mean choose."

It's an easy instinct to follow. go means "go", with means "with", so went with Oakridge sounds like "went somewhere together with Oakridge" — which has nothing to do with which vendor was chosen.

But the item is fine. The Cambridge Dictionary lists a sense of go with as "to accept an idea", with the example I think we can go with the advertising agency's suggestions. Wiktionary puts it more bluntly: to choose or accept. A native speaker who says I'll go with the salmon in a restaurant is ordering the salmon, not proposing to leave with it.

The reader's instinct is exactly the trap phrasal verbs set: you know every word, and the combination still means something else.

Why can't you work out a phrasal verb from its parts?

A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small word — usually up, out, off, down, in, on and the like — that together work as a single verb. The trouble is that the whole often isn't the sum of the parts:

Phrasal verb	Literal guess	What it actually means	A more formal single word
go with	go somewhere with someone	choose, opt for	choose
come up with	come up alongside	think of (an idea, a plan)	devise
run into	run inside	meet by chance; hit (a problem)	encounter
turn down	rotate downward	refuse	decline
put off	place away	delay until later	postpone
figure out	calculate outward	work out, understand	determine
call off	call away	cancel (a planned event)	cancel
find out	find outside	discover, learn	discover

They are also everywhere. Gardner and Davies (2007, TESOL Quarterly) counted 518,923 phrasal verbs in the 100-million-word British National Corpus and found that just 20 verbs (go, come, take, get, set…) combined with 8 particles (out, up, on, back, down, in, over, off) account for more than half of them (50.4%). The 100 most frequent phrasal verbs have 559 meanings between them in the WordNet lexical database — five or six each on average. Their example is put out: WordNet lists 10 senses, from "to inconvenience someone" to "to smother a fire".

The same few verbs and the same few particles, recombined over and over, each pairing with several meanings. It looks like pure memorisation.

But the particles are less arbitrary than they look.

up, out, off, down: the particles have meanings of their own

A strand of cognitive linguistics has studied exactly these little words. Susan Lindner's 1981 PhD dissertation at the University of California, San Diego analysed verb-particle constructions with out and up, showing how the meanings of the two particles extend from space (outward, upward) into abstract uses. Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn's Word Power: Phrasal Verbs and Compounds (2003) turned the approach into a textbook: about 1,100 combinations, organised by 17 particles, each chapter starting from the particle's spatial image and working out to its abstract uses.

Simplified, it looks roughly like this (the "extended meaning" column is common teaching practice; not every row is settled):

Particle	Core image	Extended meaning	Examples
up	upward	more	speed up, turn up the volume
up	to the top, full	all the way, completely	use up, eat up, fill up, drink up
out	out of a container	brought out, found, made clear	find out, figure out, sort out
out	out, to the end	gone, none left	run out
off	away, disconnected	stopped, cancelled	turn off, call off
off	pushed away from now	postponed	put off
down	downward	less	cut down, slow down, turn down the volume

Why can up mean "all the way"? Think of fill up. As you pour, the water level rises until it reaches the rim, and the glass is full. Going up to the top is getting it done. Stretch the same image and eat up is eating until the plate is empty, use up is using until there's nothing left.

And why can up also mean "more"? Lakoff and Johnson pointed out in Metaphors We Live By (1980) that English routinely talks about more as up and less as down (MORE IS UP; LESS IS DOWN): prices go up, sales go down. speed up and slow down come from the same place.

The table won't let you guess every new phrasal verb correctly. What it does is turn the ones you've already learned from a pile of noise into a family. The next time you meet drink up, you'll recognise its up as the up in use up.

Why do fill in and fill out mean the same thing?

If particles have stable meanings, how can fill in and fill out mean the same thing? Aren't in and out opposites?

Both are right. Oxford Learner's Dictionaries enters fill something out and adds that people also say fill something in, especially in British English. So both are understood on both sides of the Atlantic, with British speakers favouring fill in and American speakers favouring fill out.

They don't clash because the two particles look at the same act from different angles:

• fill in looks at the blanks, one at a time: you put words into each box.
• fill out looks at the whole form: you fill it until it's complete and nothing is left blank. out here is closer to "in full", as in write out (to write something out in full).

That's a plausible explanation, not a law. But it shows something real: a particle describes how you look at an action, and the same action can be looked at in more than one way.

slow up and slow down work the same way. The Cambridge Dictionary puts the two under a single definition — "to become slower, or to make someone or something become slower" — with We slowed up when we saw the police as an example. down is the "less" sense. The up in slow up isn't "upward"; one plausible reading is that it's closer to the "do it fully" up of eat up.

So one particle can carry several meanings (up can be "more" or "all the way"), and part of reading is choosing the right one. turn up the volume makes it louder; eat up empties the plate. Those are two different ups.

Your language probably does this too

English isn't unusual here. Many languages attach a small direction or result word to a verb, and those little words are just as hard for outsiders.

Chinese is a good example. Chinese speakers say 吃完 (finish eating) and 用光 (use up), where 完 and 光 do the job of the "all the way" up; 想出來 (think out, come up with) and 查出來 (find out), where 出來 ("come out") plays the role of out; and 慢下來 (slow down), where 下來 ("come down") works like down.

Some of them even share English's picture: 看得起 (literally, roughly, "can look up at") means to respect someone, like look up to, and 看不起 ("can't look up at") means to look down on them — both languages put respect above. But plenty can't be guessed either. 對不起, "sorry", is literally something like "face + not + up". A learner of Chinese meeting 對不起 for the first time is about as puzzled as a learner of English meeting went with.

How does the TOEIC test them? Phrasal verbs live in the listening

We went through the ETS official TOEIC Listening and Reading sample test from start to finish.

In the reading sample items (Parts 5–7) we found no idiomatic phrasal verbs at all. They are all in the listening:

• Part 1, question 2: the wrong option (A) is A woman is putting on a pair of shoes. put on is the act of getting dressed.
• Part 2, question 8: asked how well Thomas plays the violin, the wrong option (C) is I'll turn down the volume. turn down here means "make quieter" — the "less" sense of down. Violin, volume: it sounds related, and it doesn't answer the question.
• Part 3, questions 35–37: a speaker wants to take on a managerial role.
• Part 3, questions 41–43: the conversation opens with a plan to set her up with a laptop and extra monitor for a new designer.
• Part 4, question 72: the question asks When can the listener pick up his car? — but the phone message says you're welcome to come get your car anytime tomorrow. The message never says pick up. The question uses the phrasal verb, and you have to know that pick up means come get. The answer is (B) Tomorrow.

Question 72 is the clearest case: what you hear and what the question says are often two ways of saying the same thing. The item at the top of this post works the same way: the question says choose, the answer says went with.

Two habits help most when you learn phrasal verbs:

1. Pair each one with a formal single word: put off = postpone, call off = cancel, turn down = decline, find out = discover. Know both sides and a paraphrase won't lose you.
2. Learn them in sentences: turn down the volume makes it quieter; turn down an offer refuses it. Change the object and the meaning changes — and "refuse" is hard to derive from the image of down at all.

There are patterns — just no guarantees

A few things to be clear about:

• We cut a terminological corner. Strictly speaking, grammars call verb + preposition combinations such as go with and run into prepositional verbs, and keep them apart from verb + adverb-particle combinations such as give up and turn down. For a learner the problem is the same, so this post treats them together.
• Particle meanings help you understand, not predict. Cognitive analyses mostly explain why an existing phrasal verb makes sense; they don't promise you can derive one you've never seen. put up with (tolerate) and make up (invent, reconcile, put on cosmetics) still have to be learned one by one.
• The same particle can point the opposite way. up can mean "more" (speed up), yet slow up means getting slower. The table is a map, not a formula.
• The British/American split on fill in and fill out is a tendency, not a rule. Both sides use both; only the proportions differ.

Conclusion: going with Oakridge

Hearing went with as "went somewhere together" isn't a wild mistake. If you want a literal hook, try this: after weighing several vendors, you decide to go along with Oakridge — and that is choosing it.

Not every phrasal verb yields to reasoning, but the little words are not random. up rises and fills; out comes out and runs to the end; off goes away; down goes down and gets smaller. Put those images in your head first, and the phrasal verbs you've already learned start recognising each other as relatives.

Next time you're at a restaurant, try I'll go with the salmon. The waiter will bring you the salmon, and will not leave with you.

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In Handy 990, Phrases → Practice → Phrase Practice has 9,417 questions, about 7,900 of them on phrasal verbs — go with, come up with, turn down, put off, fill in, fill out and slow up are all in there, each in a full sentence where you pick the phrase that fits the blank. In the same series, "Everyday English words that change meaning at the office" covers another trap where you know every word and still miss the meaning, and "British vs. American English vocabulary" collects more pairs like fill in and fill out where each side has its favourite.