Phrasal Verbs With Put at B1: Put Off, Put Up With, Put Through and More
Put is one of the shortest verbs in English and one of the busiest. On its own it means to place something somewhere. Add a small word and it can mean to postpone, to tolerate, to connect a phone call or to criticise someone. This article covers the put phrasal verbs that B1 learners meet most, and the one grammar point that decides where the object goes.
A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small word such as off, up or through, and together they often mean something the verb alone does not. With put, the gap between the parts and the whole is especially wide. Put off has nothing to do with placing anything; it means to postpone.
The verbs below come from our B1 phrasal verbs list, which marks the level at which a learner is likely to meet each one. A few A2 ones are included first, because they are the foundation the B1 meanings build on.
The literal ones first (A2)
These keep the basic meaning of put, to place something somewhere, and the small word only says where. You probably know most of them already, which makes them a good place to see the pattern.
| Phrasal verb | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| put on | dress in clothes, shoes or glasses | Put your coat on, it is cold. |
| put away | store something where it belongs | Please put the dishes away. |
| put back | return something to its usual place | Put the book back on the shelf when you finish. |
| put up | attach something to a wall | We put up some pictures in the hall. |
The B1 meanings
At B1 the meanings move away from placing things. These are the ones that come up in everyday conversation and at work.
| Phrasal verb | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| put off | postpone; decide to do something later | I keep putting off the dentist. |
| put up with | accept something annoying without complaining | I cannot put up with this noise any longer. |
| put through | connect someone on the phone | Could you put me through to the manager, please? |
| put together | join parts to make a whole | It took us an hour to put the shelf together. |
| put down | criticise someone or make them feel stupid | He is always putting his brother down. |
| put in for | officially ask for something | She put in for a transfer to the Berlin office. |
| put back | change an event to a later time | The meeting has been put back to Friday. |
Where does the object go?
This is the grammar point that causes most mistakes. Most put phrasal verbs are separable: the object can go before or after the small word.
With a noun, both orders are correct. You can say put off the meeting or put the meeting off. With a pronoun such as it, them or him, the pronoun must go in the middle. Put it off is correct; put off it is a mistake that native speakers notice immediately.
Two verbs in this article are not separable, and they have three parts: put up with and put in for. The object always goes at the end. You say I cannot put up with it, never put it up with.
| Correct | Wrong |
|---|---|
| Put it off until Monday. | Put off it until Monday. |
| Put them away, please. | Put away them, please. |
| I put up with it for years. | I put it up with for years. |
Common mistakes
Put off and put back can both mean to move something later, and learners often treat them as identical. Put off is the everyday one, especially for something you do not want to do: I put off calling him. Put back is mostly used for scheduled events and is more common in British English: the launch was put back a month.
Put down has several meanings. With an object such as a cup it is literal: put your cup down. With a person as the object it means to criticise them, and it is not friendly. Context decides, so read the whole sentence before you choose the meaning.
Finally, put on is for clothes, and wear is for the state of having them on. You put on a jacket in the morning, and then you wear it all day. I am putting on a jacket describes the moment of dressing, not what you have on.
How to learn them
Learning eleven verbs with the same first word at once is a recipe for mixing them up. A better approach is to learn three or four, each inside a sentence that is true for you, such as I always put off my tax return, and then to come back to them over the following days, leaving a longer gap each time.
Once put off and put up with feel automatic, add the next group. The B1 phrasal verbs list shows which other verbs sit at the same level, and the full phrasal verbs list has the A2 to C1 sets.