English Phrasal Verbs – out part 3

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If you are ‘tired out’ you are very tired.

  • All this work is beginning to tire me out. I need a break.
  • The long journey has tired me out.

If you ‘back out’ of something, you decide not to do something that you had previously agreed to do.

  • John was going to make the presentation but he backed out at the last minute.
  • You’ve signed the contract so you can’t back out now.

If you ‘sort something out’, you solve any problems or difficulties.

  • I had to sort out a problem with our delivery times.
  • We’re meeting on Monday to sort out the details of the new contract.

If you ‘pull out’ of negotiations or an agreement, you stop being involved in it.

  • They have pulled out of the deal because they didn’t like our payment terms.
  • The unions have pulled out of the negotiations and are now threatening strike action.

If you ‘rule out’ something or someone, you decide that it is not suitable or is impossible.

  • I think we can rule him out for the job as he doesn’t speak Italian well enough.
  • We haven’t ruled out the possibility of appointing a local agent.

If you ‘find something out’, you get new information that you want to have or you learn a fact or information for the first time.

  • I only found out about this earlier today.
  • We need to find out a lot more before we can give a definitive answer.

If you ‘wash out’ your clothes, you clean them, often by hand. If you have a stain in your clothes, you can try to ‘wash out’ the stain.

  • I usually wash out my clothes in the sink when I am staying in a hotel.
  • Red wine is really hard to wash out.

If a sports competition cannot continue because of rain, it has been ‘washed out’.

  • The tennis at Wimbledon was washed out for the day.
  • There so much rain that it might wash out the game.

In US informal English, if you ‘wash out’, you fail to finish something or to achieve the necessary standard.

  • He was a big football star in college but he washed out in the NFL.
  • The training course is tough but I’m not going to wash out.

If you ‘spread something out’, you move things apart so that there is plenty of space or time between them.

  • I’ll spread these photos out on the table so that you can all see them.
  • You can spread the payments out over several months.

exercise 1
exercise 2
exercise 3
exercise 4

4 Comments

dharani kumar raju

Nov 11, 2011, 11:01 am

very great sir

Natalya

Nov 11, 2011, 5:55 pm

Thank you so much! Most of these phrasel verbs u give are new for me.

Nuraddeen Abubakar Naseer

Nov 11, 2011, 5:03 am

wow! So great and interesting, thank you ALL.

A.C.Mathews

Nov 11, 2012, 6:08 am

Thanks a lot for sending these lessons which are very important to English learners.

Maria

Feb 2, 2013, 11:14 pm

Thank you very much! Every lesson contains something new and very important.to me that helps me understand better this language.

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