The English phrasal verb has always caused problems for foreign learners. Yet combinations of verb and adverb or preposition are among the very first things that the English-speaking child learns to understand and say: Go away, Come on, Shut up! Such expressions are basic to everyday conversation and universal on radio and television, in films and in newspapers and magazines. People just can't get on' (= succeed) or get ahead (= progress well) without them.
The compact dictionary, the pioneer in the field, continues to provide the quickest, simplest and easiest way for learners to build up and try out hundreds of phrasal verbs and their associated idioms and derived words. The vervs are specially classified as sep. (separable) and fus. (fused, not separable) according to how they are used. Field and style labels such as Comm for Commerce and Sl for Slang indicate the situations and ways in which to use them.