Meaning & use
pick on someone
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Meanings
verbtransitive
to repeatedly treat someone unfairly by criticizing, blaming, or annoying them.
Grammar: Always takes a person as object: pick on someone. Often used in the passive: He was picked on at school.
Patterns
- pick on someone
- be picked on by someone
The older kids used to pick on him because he was small.
Stop picking on your sister—she hasn't done anything wrong.
She felt that her boss was picking on her for no reason.
verbtransitive
to single out someone for a particular task or role, sometimes unfairly.
Grammar: Often used when someone is chosen for an unpleasant job: pick on someone to do something.
Patterns
- pick on someone to do something
Why do they always pick on me to clean the bathroom?
The teacher picked on Tom to answer the difficult question.
Common combinations
- pick on someone for something
- The other children picked on him for his accent.
- pick on someone about something
- She's always picking on me about my messy room.
- be picked on
- He was picked on constantly at his old school.
- pick on the new kid
- It's not fair to pick on the new kid.
Synonyms and how they differ
- bully
- Bully is stronger and suggests more serious, often physical or psychological harm; pick on can be milder, like constant teasing.
- tease
- Tease can be playful or affectionate, while pick on always implies unfairness and repetition.
- criticize
- Criticize focuses on pointing out faults, often once; pick on suggests a repeated, targeted pattern.
Opposites
Commonly confused: pick on someone or pick?
pick on someone vs pick
Pick on is a phrasal verb meaning 'harass'; pick alone means 'choose' or 'select'.
Practice
Which sentence uses 'pick on' correctly?
Choose one answer.
'Pick on' means to repeatedly treat someone unfairly, so it fits with a person as object. The other options use 'pick' to mean 'choose', which requires no 'on'.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “pick on someone”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.