Gave up

Question

I gave up smoking. I know that gave up is a phrasal verb but which sense of the particle up is used here?

UP (adjective, adverb, preposition) definition and synonyms | Macmillan Dictionary

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/up_1

I couldn't figure out which definition of the word up fits the context.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Jigneshbharati
I gave up smoking. I know that gave up is a phrasal verb but which sense of the particle up is used here?
UP (adjective, adverb, preposition) definition and synonyms | Macmillan Dictionary
link

I couldn't figure out which definition of the word up fits the context.

Give up- is a phrasal verb made up of a main verb and a preposition which means to let go. Its meaning is fixed and can not be interpreted separately.

CalifJim · Answer

JigneshbharatiI know that gave up is a phrasal verb

Ah. But do you know what that means? Probably 98% of phrasal verbs are idioms. An idiom is a group of words that must be understood as a group, as if the group were just one word. Picking apart the idiom and finding the definition of each word in it will not tell you the meaning of the idiom.

In the following sentence, you can look up "kick" and "bucket" in a dictionary, but that will not help you to understand the meaning of this sentence.

I'm sorry to tell you that your dog kicked the bucket last night.
(It means that the dog died.)

This is why phrasal verbs need to be learned as if they were just one word.

So the explanation (not definition) of 'up' in "give up" is this:

up: often used as the second element of a phrasal verb.

These words are the most frequently used as the second element of a phrasal verb: up, down, in, out, on, off, away, back

For a list of hundreds of phrasal verbs with 'up', see

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_phrasal_verbs

and click on "English phrasal verbs with particle (up)".

CJ

GPY · Answer

"give up" as in "give up smoking" is an idiomatic expression, and the individual meanings of "give" and "up" are not obvious in our minds when we use it. It seems to me that this "give up" probably developed from the "yield" meaning that we see in e.g. "I gave up my child for adoption", wherein "up" apparently means something like "away from one's possession" (as also in e.g. "offer up"), possibly originally related to literally raising something in one's hand, or to giving to a "higher" person, and perhaps also now coloured by the "done to completion" sense of "up". They don't seem to cover the "away from one's possession" sense of "up" at Macmillan Dictionary, possibly because they think it exists only in idiomatic combinations (they have separate articles for "give up" and "offer up"), or possibly just because no one considered it.

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