by Liz Walter
I have written several posts about phrasal verbs, including an introduction to what they are and how to use them. However, I realised today that I have never written about some of the most common phrasal verbs there are – ones that we use to talk about actions that take place every day.
You will almost certainly find that you know some of them already, and it is worth learning any that are new to you because they are all extremely common, and most of them have no one-word equivalent.
The first thing that happens every morning is that we wake up. We can also say that we wake someone up:
I woke up at 7.30. (In US punctuation, write the time as 7:30.)
My Dad wakes me up at 6 a.m. every day.
The next thing most of us do is get up. Although it is possible to say get out of bed, get up is much more common, especially to talk about regular habits:
I usually get up at 7.
We also use get up in the phrases get up early or get up late:
I have to get up early tomorrow, as I have a meeting at 8.
I put on a hat because it was cold outside.
Why don’t you take your jacket off?
In British English, you can say that you do up the buttons, zip, laces, etc. on a piece of clothing or that you do up a jacket, coat, etc, meaning that you fasten it:
Can you help me do up my shoelaces?
Make sure you do your coat up – it’s cold today.
We also use several phrasal verbs to talk about keeping our home clean and tidy. We use the verbs tidy up (UK) or clean up (mainly US, but also used in the UK), which can be used with or without an object:
I spent all evening tidying up.
I need to clean up my bedroom.
Please would you pick up your dirty clothes?
Mum asked me to put the dishes away.
Did you throw away those old newspapers?
If you are tired in the evening, you might sit down and watch TV or even lie down and rest for a while. If not, you might go out with friends. And at the end of the day, you go to bed and sleep until you wake up and start all over again!