A FOLLOWER of my Facebook page for Jose Carillo’s English Forum, Maria Fernandez, told me in a post a few weeks ago that she finds phrasal verbs deceiving: “I get confused trying to distinguish them from idioms. Are they the same?”

My answer, belated because I got to read her post only the other day, is definitely not. An idiom can be any of the broad class of fixed or conventional expressions—whether a word, phrase, or sentence—with either an intended literal or figurative meaning but whose constituent word or words have a meaning or sense different from their dictionary definitions. On the other hand, a phrasal verb is an idiomatic phrase that combines a particular verb with a preposition or adverb to denote an action different from the combined meaning of that verb and the other constituent words.

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