Fall into

Fall into (a category)

Today I’m going to show you how to use the phrasal verb “fall into” when talking about categories. And I’m going to show you two ways to use it. First, I’m going to show you how to talk about a big group of things and all the ways to categorize them. Then, I’m going to show you how to say what category just one thing belongs to.

When we use “fall into” in this way, we always start with a population: a lot of individual things. It could be people, but it doesn’t have to be. What we need are lots of individual things that are little different from one another. Then we also need a list of categories.

So let’s think of something—here’s one. Plain English episodes—the main stories. There are going on 700 of them. But how do you know which of the older ones you want to listen to? Plain English episodes fall into fourteen categories.

You can see them at PlainEnglish.com/lessons

The lessons fall into fourteen categories. That means: we have our whole population of lessons, now 679 of them. That’s the population. We have the categories. Business, technology, arts and culture, health, food, travel—there are others, there are fourteen of them.

So we have our lessons. We have our categories. And every lesson—every single one of them—every lesson belongs to one of the fourteen categories. So we say, the lessons fall into fourteen categories. And you can pick the category that most interests you and listen to the lessons that fall into that category.

Here’s how you might use “fall into” in the past tense. At a museum or art gallery, there might be paintings or artworks from multiple genres. That’s how it was at the Salon , the famous art exhibition in Paris. But there weren’t that many different types of paintings then. Most paintings there fell into just a few categories: mythology, historical events, and prominent people. That means most paintings at the exhibition could be put into one of those three categories. Most paintings at the Salon fell into those three categories.

Imagine you run the customer service department of a small business that sells widgets—any physical thing. You look at the customer service tickets that come in from the website or the customer support phone line. And you analyze the tickets, the issues. And you determine that some of these tickets are about refund requests, some of them are people having problems using the product, and some of them are people who want to track their shipment.

That’s it. There’s no other reason why your customers call support. Those three categories: they’re asking for a refund, they have a problem with the product, or they want to track their shipment.

So you can say that customer support requests fall into three categories.

That’s how you use “fall into” when talking about many things. Now let me show you how to use it when talking about just one thing.

Go back to our last example: you are the manager of the customer service department. All the agents are required to put every call into one of the three categories. A customer calls and says, “I really don’t like this product. What can you do to help?”

The agent is confused. What category is this? The customer didn’t ask for a refund. He knows how to use it. And he doesn’t need to track the shipment. So what category does this fall into?

That simply means, “what category does this call belong to?” And you can say, as the manager, “That falls into the refund request category.” You can tell the agent what category it belongs to by saying, “It falls into” plus the category. This call falls into the refund request category. He didn’t use the word “refund,” but that’s essentially what he’s asking for. That’s why the call falls into that category.

One last tip for you. When we use “fall into,” we’re most often talking about categories that we humans make. So for example, you would not say, “an orange falls into the fruit category” because an orange is a fruit. That’s not what humans determined it to be—that’s just what it is.

But let’s say you’re working at a grocery store, in the back, at the receiving dock, where all the products come in off the trucks. It’s your job to sort all the shipments from the day into categories so other people can put them on the right shelves. And let’s say you see a shipment of mixed nuts, but you don’t know what section to put them in. You might ask a manager, “what category do mixed nuts fall into?” And the manager might say, “Oh, that falls into snacks.”

See you next time!

That brings us to the end of this Plain English. I’m so happy that you were able to join us for this one. Remember the full lesson—all the resources, everything we produce for the lesson—is at PlainEnglish.com/679.

And if you haven’t seen the website yet—the free membership includes access to a quiz about the topic. So it’s a great way to engage with the topic, start thinking in English. It’s not graded, no pressure. You take it again if you get some questions wrong. But it’s a good thing to do after every lesson.

PlainEnglish.com/679 is where you find all that. And that’s all for us today. See you right back here on Monday.