Prepositions are small words like at, of, for, since, to, and so on. Although each preposition has a general meaning, each preposition’s use in combination with certain verbs and nouns must be learned on a case-by-case basis.

Prepositions can also act as parts of verbal phrases (svenska: verb partiklar), which is to say that a certain preposition in combination with a certain verb can take a new and different meaning (e.g., look up can be taken literally to mean ‘look upwards toward the sky’, but it often means ‘to search for something’, as in to “I had to look up the word in the dictionary”).