5 Phrasal Verbs with BLOW!

5 Phrasal Verbs with BLOW!

Hello! I’m Emma from mmmEnglish! Back with another phrasal verbs lesson this week and I wonder if you can guess what the verb in our phrasal verb is this week. Blow. Actually, a lot of my students have trouble pronouncing this word. Do you? The two consonant sounds at the start are a little tricky to push together and so it can sound a little bit like you’re saying below. It’s quite hard to hear the difference between the two. Blow. And below. They sound very similar, don’t they?

And that’s because the first syllable is unstressed in below and you can hear the very, very lazy schwa sound below. Below. Now, blow. My tongue is already in the position of the sound when my lips part to make the sound. Blow. Blow. Blow is one syllable and below is two syllables. There’s a little extra vowel sound in there that you need to make sure that you include when you say below and you exclude when you say blow. Okay, I got a little sidetracked there. So I started talking about something different to what I really wanted to talk to you about today!

Phrasal verbs with blow. Blow. So all phrasal verbs in English are made up of a verb and either a preposition like up or an adverb like apart. Now phrasal verbs are frustrating to learn but super fun to use once you know how and I have made a video with my top tips for learning phrasal verbs. You can check it out right there but one tip that I do want to share with you today is don’t let phrasal verbs overwhelm you! There are hundreds and hundreds of phrasal verbs that you will need to learn but today you’re just going to focus on five and this week, I only want you to focus on those five phrasal verbs. Okay, let’s crack on with the lesson!

Starting with blow off. Now blow off has a few different meanings depending on who you’re talking to. My American friends like to use this word when they’re deliberately not meeting someone when they’ve made a plan or they’ve said that they would but they’re deliberately choosing not to. They don’t care about the commitment that they made. I’m supposed to meet Sam in 20 minutes but I’ll just blow him off. But my British friends always laugh at this phrasal verb because it means to fart.

To pass wind? Oh I don’t know there’s about a hundred different ways to say that but it’s the air that comes from your bum. Did you just blow off?! In Australia we rarely use that phrasal verb for anything but we do use the expression “to blow someone’s socks off” which is an idiom used when someone or something really surprises or impresses you. He said the show blew his socks off. Blow out. Used with candles. When it’s your birthday you’ve got to blow out the candles on your cake. Have you heard of the expression to blow someone or something out of the water?

It means to completely destroy or completely beat something to show that someone or something is much, much better than someone else. Now I know that I can swim fast but Katherine blew me out of the water. Now you’ll also see this phrasal verb as a compound noun which might confuse you for a second but this is a noun. Most often it’s used when a car tire bursts especially if you’re travelling at really high speeds. We were running on time, but we’ve had a blowout, so I don’t think we’ll arrive at 6. Now in Australia, we also use this phrasal verb quite frequently to describe a sudden increase in something. Usually relating to money. We’ve had a bit of a blowout.

We spent too much, we’ve spent too much money. The government was under pressure after the huge budget blowout. To blow up. Now, blow up has a few different meanings one is used when something is destroyed by an explosion. Often it’s used with bombs or cars or buildings. The soldiers blew up the old shoe factory. As the sun rose, they saw that the hospital had been blown up. Now this phrasal verb can be separable or inseparable. You can also say they blew the hospital up. You can also blow something up by filling it with air like a balloon or a tire or a beach ball.

The front wheel on my bike needs blowing up. Can you help me blow up these balloons? When you’re talking about a photo that you want to make larger or bigger to fit in a frame, then you would blow it up. How much will it cost to blow up this picture? Now you could blow up at somebody too, which means to become really angry at them. My dad blew up at me when I arrived home late. I didn’t mean to blow up at you before, I’m sorry. Now there’s an idiom that you may have heard before, it’s when something blows up in your face. That’s when something goes wrong unexpectedly.

Maybe it embarrasses you or makes you feel ashamed. I’m worried that that plan is going to blow up in your face, it’s not a good idea. Well, that blew up in my face, didn’t it? To blow apart. To blow apart is used in a similar context. When something is completely destroyed in an explosion, it is blown apart. After the gas explosion, the main factory was completely blown apart. But this phrasal verb can also be used to show that an idea is completely false by putting forward another much better argument. The student’s explanation blew apart the professor’s theory.

So the students explanation proved that the professor’s theory was incorrect or not true. He blew it apart, completely shattered it. To blow away. So a strong wind can blow something away, right? The wind blows and if it’s strong, it’s going to blow things away, rubbish, trees. Really strong winds, cars, boats. But you’ve probably heard me use this phrasal verb to say that I’m really impressed and pleased by something. I use it all the time. In fact, there is another video where you can watch me explain it right here. The fact that I’m sitting here in my home in Australia teaching students all around the world, blows me away! Well, how many of these phrasal verbs did you already know? Perhaps you knew all of them but maybe you learnt a couple of new ways to use them.