What are office phrasal verbs?
Phrasal verbs are combinations of a verb and a particle, such as "fill in", "call off" or "deal with", whose meaning sits in the pair rather than in the verb alone. In office English they carry a large share of what is actually said in meetings, email and conversation.
- A noun object may stand on either side of the particle: "fill in the form" or "fill the form in".
- With a separable pair the pronoun goes in the middle: "fill it in", not "fill in it".
- Inseparable pairs such as "go over" and "deal with" stay together: "go over it", "deal with it".
B1 · Idioms & Collocations · 10 minOffice phrasal verbs, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-slide lesson for B1 learners. Hear two phrasal verbs in context, learn from a tutor why a pronoun sits in a different place in English than in German, meet sixteen everyday office verbs sorted by situation, then practise the word order in interactive drills before a closing quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelB1 · Intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsVocabulary, Grammar, Listening, Speaking
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
What an office phrasal verb actually is
At B1 your vocabulary is usually in decent shape. You know the verbs, you know the prepositions, and still the meeting stops for you at exactly the moment somebody says "can you fill it in and send it back". That is not a grammar problem; it is a particular kind of vocabulary problem. A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small particle, and the meaning only appears in the pair. Take the verb "call". On its own it means to shout or to telephone. Put "off" behind it and you get cancel. Put "back" behind it instead and you get return a call. Put "in" behind it and you are bringing somebody in to help. The verb on its own does not tell you what is meant; the particle decides with it. That is precisely why a dictionary helps you so little when you look up the verb alone. In spoken working English these pairs carry a large share of the load. They turn up constantly in meetings, in internal email and in short exchanges at the desk, without anybody noticing they are there. For you that means: do not learn the verb, learn the pair, together with the situation it belongs to. This lesson takes sixteen pairs that genuinely keep coming back at work and sorts them by exactly those situations.
02 / 06
Meetings and scheduling: set up, call off, put off, bring forward, go over
The first group turns up wherever appointments get made and then start to wobble. "Set up" means arrange, schedule, organise: "we set up a call for Tuesday". It describes building something new, from a single appointment to a whole project team. "Call off" means cancel, and it means it finally: the thing is not happening, and there is no replacement date. "Put off", by contrast, means postpone, push to a later point. The typical sentence is "we put the meeting off until Friday"; the preposition "until" and a new date almost always travel with it. "Bring forward" is the opposite direction, moving an appointment earlier, as in "can we bring the workshop forward to Wednesday". Mix those two up and you arrange things in the wrong direction, which nobody notices until the room stays empty. Finally, "go over" means review, check, look at something together: "let us go over the agenda first". This pair is inseparable, so the object always follows it: "go over it", never "go it over". That gives you both builds inside a single group, the separable and the inseparable, and it shows you straight away that you cannot tell from the outside which sort a pair belongs to.
03 / 06
Documents and tasks: fill in, hand in, print out, carry out, back up, sort out
The second group travels with paper, files and tasks. "Fill in" means complete a form: "fill in the form". "Hand in" means submit to somebody who wants it — your manager, the finance team, an authority. "Print out" means make a paper copy, and it really does mean the paper rather than the file. "Carry out" means perform or conduct: "carry out an inspection", "carry out a survey". This pair matters particularly for you, because it proves that phrasal verbs are not automatically casual; "carry out" sits perfectly naturally in reports, inspection records and technical documents. "Back up" carries two office meanings that have nothing to do with each other: make a safety copy, and support a colleague. "Back up the file" and "I will back you up in the meeting" are both everyday sentences, and the context makes clear which one is meant. "Sort out" means resolve, organise, put right, usually applied to something that has become a mess: "I will sort out the invoices". All six pairs in this group are separable. That means you can put a noun on either side of the particle, while a pronoun has only the middle slot left.
04 / 06
People and communication: get back to, follow up on, catch up with, take on, deal with
The third group is about people. "Get back to somebody" means reply later, with an answer you do not have yet: "I will get back to you by Friday". That sentence is worth its weight at work, because it politely buys you time without sounding evasive. "Follow up on something" means chase it, check how it is progressing: "I will follow up on the quote next week". "Catch up with somebody" means exchange news after a gap, sometimes about a project, sometimes over coffee. "Take on" means accept and assume, applied to work and to people alike: "she took on two new clients", "we are taking on three apprentices". And "deal with" means handle something, usually a problem: "I will deal with the complaint myself". In the first three combinations, two small words follow the verb, and the object then comes after both of them: "get back to her", "follow up on it", "catch up with him". "Deal with" is inseparable, while "take on" is separable, so you can also say "take the account on". Here too only one thing really helps: learn the pair inside a real sentence from your own working week.
05 / 06
The mechanics: separable, inseparable, and the pronoun slot
Now the mechanics, which is where B1 is won. Separable phrasal verbs allow an object between the verb and the particle. When that object is a noun, you have a choice: "fill in the form" and "fill the form in" are both correct. When the object is long, the version with the particle in front usually sounds better, because the heavy element then slides to the end. When the object is a pronoun, however, the choice disappears completely. A pronoun has to go in the middle: "fill it in", "print them out", "sort it out". "Fill in it" is not a matter of style here; it is simply not an English sentence. Inseparable phrasal verbs do not offer that choice at all. With "go over", "deal with" or "get back to", the unit stays together and the object follows it, whether noun or pronoun: "go over the figures", "go over them", "deal with the complaint", "deal with it". So how do you tell which pair belongs to which sort? Not reliably from the form; you cannot see it from the outside. The workable route is to write every new pair down with a pronoun straight away. An entry like "fill in — fill it in" stores the build automatically, and you never have to guess it again.
06 / 06
Two German traps: particle arithmetic, and fleeing into formality
Two further traps come straight out of German. The first is particle arithmetic. German separable verbs suggest that every prefix has a fixed English counterpart, and that the particle brings its spatial meaning along with it. Neither is true. "Call off" has nothing to do with telephoning, and "take on" does not mean switching something on — it means accepting or taking over. The particle steers the meaning, but it does so unpredictably, which is why you learn the pair as a fixed unit rather than as a sum. The second trap is fleeing into formality. Because phrasal verbs feel colloquial to German ears, many learners reach for "cancel", "postpone", "complete" and "distribute" everywhere, and then sound in a meeting like a written report. You will be understood without any difficulty, but you will sound distant. As a tendency: in conversation and internal email, native speakers often choose the phrasal verb, while contracts and formal reports lean towards the Latinate twin. It is not a hard rule, as "carry out" shows — that one is entirely at home in technical writing. If you want to keep working on fixed word blocks, business-idioms-basics (B1) is the right next step.