You're reading an article and you hit this sentence:

"She had to put up with the noise for three months."

You know put. You know up. You know with. You still have no idea what the sentence means.

So you look it up. You select "put", search it, and get: to move something into a position. None of that helps. The problem isn't your vocabulary — it's that you're using a tool that physically cannot answer the question you're asking.

The Problem: Meaning Isn't Additive

A dictionary is an index of words. One entry, one word. That model works beautifully for serendipity and completely fails for put up with, because the meaning of a phrasal verb is not the sum of its parts.

What you look up	What you get	What you needed
put	to move something into a position	—
up	toward a higher place	—
with	accompanied by	—
put up with	(no entry)	to tolerate something without complaining

Nothing in "move something into a higher position accompanied by" gets you to "tolerate." The meaning is idiomatic: it lives in the combination, not the components. Linguists call these non-compositional expressions, and English is unusually full of them.

This is why looking up the individual words feels like it should work and never does.

Why This Hits English Learners Hardest

Phrasal verbs are not a fringe corner of English. They're how native speakers actually talk. Compare:

Formal (usually Latin-derived)	What people actually say
tolerate	put up with
postpone	put off
investigate	look into
encounter	run into
escape punishment for	get away with
consider	bear in mind

Here's the cruel irony: the formal word is often the one a learner already knows, because it looks like a word in their own language. Tolerate is recognizable to a Spanish, French, or Indonesian speaker. Put up with is opaque to everyone.

So the learner has the vocabulary. They just can't map it onto the phrase in front of them — and the dictionary won't build that bridge, because the phrase isn't in it.

Four Things People Try, and Why They Fall Short

1. Looking up each word separately. Covered above. It doesn't work, and worse, it produces false confidence — you assemble a plausible-sounding literal meaning that's simply wrong.

2. Searching the phrase on Google. This sometimes works, but it costs you the page. You switch tabs, scan results, parse a forum answer, and come back having lost the thread of what you were reading. Do that six times in an article and you've stopped reading and started researching.

3. Idiom dictionaries. These genuinely help, and they exist. But you have to know that what you're looking at is an idiom before you'll think to check one. Learners usually don't — the phrase looks like ordinary words, which is exactly the trap.

4. Guessing from context. Sometimes fine. But context tells you the valence ("something bad happened") long before it tells you the meaning, and quietly-wrong guesses tend to calcify.

What Actually Works: Look Up the Whole Phrase

The fix is conceptually simple. Stop asking "what does this word mean" and start asking "what does this expression mean, here, in this sentence."

That requires two things a dictionary can't do:

Accept more than one word as the thing being looked up.
Read the surrounding sentence, so it can pick the right sense when the phrase has several.

That second one matters more than it sounds. "Get away with" in "he got away with cheating" is about avoiding punishment. "Get away with" in "take what you can get away with" is closer to "manage to do." Same phrase, different senses, disambiguated only by context.

This is what QuickDef does. Drag across a phrase — up to seven words — and a small Define button appears. Click it, and you get the meaning of the whole expression, in plain A2–B1 English, chosen for the sentence you're actually reading:

put up with · phrasal verb · B1 to accept something unpleasant without complaining "I can't put up with the noise anymore."

Double-clicking still works for single words. The phrase gesture is a drag, and it never fires on its own — selecting text to copy it does nothing, which matters if you highlight while you read.

A Short List Worth Knowing

If you're learning English, these come up constantly and none of them can be looked up word by word:

Phrase	Meaning
put up with	to accept something unpleasant without complaining
get away with	to do something wrong and not be punished
look forward to	to feel happy about something that will happen
bear in mind	to remember something important when deciding
run out of	to have none left of something
come up with	to think of an idea or plan
a piece of cake	something very easy
bring up	to start talking about a subject

Eight phrases, zero of which a dictionary will resolve for you.

The Takeaway

A dictionary isn't failing you when it can't explain "put up with" — it's answering a different question than the one you asked. It indexes words; you needed an expression.

The next time you hit a phrase that reads like nonsense despite every word being familiar, that's the signal: stop looking up the words, and look up the phrase.

QuickDef is free to start — no account required, and it works on web pages and PDFs alike.

Why Dictionaries Can't Explain Phrasal Verbs (And What to Do Instead)