This study attempts to shed new light on one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction--the English phrasal verbs. The highest frequency phrasal verb constructions in the 100-million-word British National Corpus are identified and analyzed. The findings indicate that a small subset of 20 lexical verbs combines with eight adverbial particles (160 combinations) to account for more than one half of the 518,923 phrasal verb occurrences identified in the megacorpus. A more specific analysis indicates that only 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly one third of all phrasal-verb occurrences in the British National Corpus, and 100 phrasal verbs account for more than one half of all such items. Subsequent semantic analyses show that these 100 high-frequency phrasal verb forms have potentially 559 variant-meaning senses. The authors discuss how learners, teachers, and materials developers might utilize the findings of the study to improve instruction of phrasal verbs in English language education. (Contains 7 tables.)