What’s wrong with this? (...I looked at it in the dictionary.)

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
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I didn’t understand the meaning of the word so I looked at it in the dictionary.

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It should read ‘… so I looked it up in the dictionary’. The German equivalent to the English phrasal verb ‘to look up a word in a dictionary’ is ‘ein Wort im Wörterbuch nachschlagen’ which literally means ‘to beat after a word’. Apparently, the Germans are a pretty violent bunch.

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Just to add to that - the phrasal verb ‘look at’ means see something for a certain length of time as in - I looked at the photo of that film star in the paper and I agree he looks exactly like your father.

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