Heal over/Heal up
 

Hi

I would like to know if I can use these phrasal verbs interchangeably when talking about a wound, cut, etc.

E.g. When the wound has healed over/up you can remove the plaster.

Thanks for your help!!

Re: Heal over/Heal up
 

No I don't think so. Presuming that we're talking about a cut, healed over to me just indicates that a scab has formed, closing the wound - but not necessarily that the skin has yet regrown. Healed up on the other hand means just that - that the wound is completely closed. It's another of the examples of up being used to give a sense of "completion", as in Eat up your spinach or Tidy up this room.

However bear in mind that it's actually more usual to use the verb heal without any particle at all. Entering the phrases into a concordancer, which searches 56 million words of a corpus containing both British and American English, I got a full page of examples with heal (ie 40 - but that's the limit of the number of examples shown), but only five with heal up and none at all for heal over.

Here are some of the examples which came up for for the first two :

... established burns are slow to heal and can easily become infected
... facilitates drainage until damaged veins can heal and ...
... a natural antiseptic, to help heal and soothe warts quickly.
The physical scars heal but sometimes the mental scars never do.
... As skin ages, its ability to heal and repair itself ...


If nappy rash does occur, and doesn't heal up quickly or is making the baby unhappy, ...
Some sores are more severe and take longer to heal up.
... expect the holes in her nose will heal up with time," said Anthea.

Re: Heal over/Heal up
 

Ana Laura,
I've found the definitions and examples in Cambridge dictionary of phrasal verbs.

heal up
if a wound or injury heals up, the injured part repairs itself and it becomes healthy again
I'm not supposed to use my arm till the bone has healed up completely.

heal over
if a wound heals over, new skin grows over it
Try to protect that cut until it heals over completely.