A separable verb is a verb that is composed of a lexical core and a separable particle. In some sentence positions, the core verb and the particle appear in one word, whilst in others the core verb and the particle are separated. The particle is traditionally referred to as a "separable prefix". German, Dutch, Yiddish, Afrikaans and Hungarian are notable for having many separable verbs.

The German verb ankommen is a separable verb, and is used here as the first illustration:

Sie

she

kommt

comes

sofort

immediately