Phrasal Verbs with GET: 25 Essential Expressions with Examples

“Get” is one of the most productive phrasal verb bases in English — dictionaries record between 40 and 60 distinct forms when all particles and meanings are counted. The good news is that the 25 most frequent GET phrasal verbs (covered in this guide) account for the vast majority of everyday usage. At B1-B2 level, mastering these 25 will make a substantial difference to your spoken fluency and reading comprehension. Practise them with our Matching Pairs and Flash Cards exercises to build strong recall.

Both expressions involve making progress or having relationships but in different ways. “Get on” (intransitive, no object) means how are things going generally: “How are you getting on?” / “Yes, we’re getting on well.” “Get on with” followed by a task means to continue making progress with something specific: “Get on with your work — stop chatting!” / “How are you getting on with the report?” “Get on with” followed by a person means to have a good relationship: “I get on really well with my new team.” The addition of “with” determines whether the focus is tasks or people relationships.

“Get away with” is a three-word (two-particle) phrasal verb and is inseparable — the three parts must always stay together, and the object always follows the complete phrase: “She got away with it” / “He gets away with everything.” You cannot split them: “She got away it with” is incorrect. Most two-particle phrasal verbs in English are inseparable because the two particles combine with the base verb to form a single unified semantic unit. If you need to use a pronoun object, it always goes at the end: “get away with it”, never “get it away with.”

“Get round to (doing something)” means to find time or opportunity to do something you have been intending but have not yet started. It almost always appears with a gerund (verb + -ing): “I haven’t got round to replying to his email yet.” / “I’ll get round to fixing the leak at the weekend.” It is often used with negatives or “eventually/finally” to suggest delay: “I eventually got round to calling her back after three days.” British English uses “get round to”; American English uses “get around to” with the same meaning.

Both involve dealing with something difficult, but with different emphasis. “Get over” implies complete recovery from illness, loss, or emotional upset — the difficulty is fully behind you: “It took six months to get over the divorce.” / “She is finally over the worst of the illness.” “Get through” implies surviving or completing a difficult period — the emphasis is on endurance and completion: “I don’t know how we got through those first few weeks.” / “I got through all the required reading by Thursday afternoon.” “Get through” also means to make successful contact with someone or a service: “I finally got through to the call centre after forty minutes on hold.”

“Get used to” means to become gradually accustomed to something new or unfamiliar. It is always followed by a noun or gerund (verb + -ing), never an infinitive: “I’m getting used to the climate” (noun) / “I’m getting used to waking up early” (gerund). Do not confuse it with “used to + infinitive” (past habit, no longer true): “I used to wake up at 9 AM” (past habit). “Get used to” describes the process of adaptation; “be used to” expresses that adaptation is already complete: “I’m now used to the noise — it doesn’t bother me any more.”

“Get at” has three main meanings in British English: (1) To imply or mean something indirectly: “What exactly are you getting at?” (2) To criticise someone repeatedly: “My boss is always getting at me about being late.” (3) To reach or access something physically: “The files are in a locked cabinet I can’t get at.” The first two meanings are particularly British and may not be immediately familiar to learners trained on American English materials, where “driving at” is more common than “getting at” in the first sense.

Most GET phrasal verbs are informal and should be replaced with single-word verbs in formal academic or business writing: “get over” → “recover from”; “get across” → “communicate” or “convey”; “get away with” → “avoid punishment for”; “get hold of” → “contact” or “obtain”; “get round to” → “find time to”; “get out of” → “avoid” or “be exempt from”. Some GET expressions are acceptable in semi-formal contexts: “get in touch” (= contact) and “get back to” (= respond to) are widely used even in professional emails. In IELTS Academic writing, prefer the formal single-word equivalent wherever one exists.

Based on corpus data from the British National Corpus and COCA, the most frequent GET phrasal verbs in spoken English are: “get up” (daily routine context), “get on” (transport and progress), “get back” (return), “get out” (departure, escape), and “get off” (leaving transport, finishing work). In natural conversation, “get on with” (continue working) and “get over” (recover) are also extremely high frequency. GET phrasal verbs often replace more formal verbs in spoken English: “get up” instead of “arise”, “get out” instead of “exit”, “get back” instead of “return.”

On LexFizz, use Flash Cards to learn and drill all 25 phrasal verbs in this guide. The Matching Pairs exercise lets you play a memory card game connecting each GET phrasal verb to its definition — this game format is particularly effective for phrasal verb learning because the matching process strengthens semantic associations. The Quiz tests your knowledge in multiple-choice format. Complete the Sentence gives you a sentence with a gap and asks you to choose the correct GET phrasal verb from options — this format mirrors real Cambridge B1 and B2 exam questions. All exercises are completely free with no account required.