Pick out

Pick out

“Pick out” means to select something when you have a large variety to choose from. The key here is, not all possible options are exactly the same. So “pick out” means to select one item from a large variety, where not all choices are the same.

Imagine a relative’s birthday is coming up, so you need to buy a gift. You might go to the mall and pick out a gift. That means, you select something to buy. You have a lot of choices; there are many things in the mall you might buy as a gift. You make one selection. You pick something out for your relative.

Now imagine it’s time to go to the party. People are going to dress up. So you open your closet and stare in at the wide variety of clothes that you own. Now, it’s time to pick out an outfit. It’s the same situation: you will choose one thing from a large selection.

It’s easy for me to pick out an outfit because the selection really isn’t that large (or interesting). But it’s a lot harder for JR to pick out an outfit. He has a wider variety of clothes than I do. He has more designs, more styles, more colors in his closet. So when he picks out—he has more fabrics, more accessories—so it’s harder for JR to pick out an outfit because he has a lot more to choose from.

Whether it’s me with my—shall we say—basic wardrobe, or JR with his more complicated one, we can say “pick out an outfit” since we are choosing an outfit from a selection of clothes.

Here’s one thing I have learned in my time here in Mexico: Mexicans take their avocados seriously. In the market near my house, there are huge mounds of avocados for sale. And the shoppers pick out the avocados that they want.

They pick them up, they look at them, they squeeze them, they turn them around, and then out of the 200 or so available avocados, the shoppers pick out the two or three they want. You—if you’re not an avocado expert—you might think they’re all the same. You would be mistaken.

There are the avocados that are ready to eat today. There are the ones that were better yesterday—those are good for salsas. Some avocados will be ripe tomorrow. Others, later this week. So when you pick out two or three avocados to buy, you’re selecting the ones you want from a wide variety—because not every one is right for you.

Like picking out a gift, you can pick something out in a store. Let’s say you need a bookshelf, so you go to Ikea . If you pick out a bookshelf, you’re selecting one model from the five, six, ten, whatever, models they have in Ikea. “Pick out” is the selection of the model because there are multiple different models available.

If there are ten white Billy model bookshelves, and you select one out of ten identical pieces, that’s not pick out. But when you look at all the models, they have the Billy model, they have the—I can’t even pronounce this—Hemnes model, the Gersby model. These are all different. If you pick out a bookcase, you select the model—the Billy model, let’s say. You’ve picked out a bookcase when you’ve selected the model. The exact one you put in your cart—that’s something different.

See you next time!

That’s all we have for you today. If you liked today’s episode about Ikea, about business, and if you have a few more minutes this week, then you can go to PlainEnglish.com/lessons and pick out another lesson from our archives. And that’s easy to do because they are arranged in categories.

So you can filter for business episodes and then pick out an older episode to listen to. There’s a lot of English you can learn this way. Look in the archives, PlainEnglish.com/lessons , and pick out a lesson to listen to over the weekend while you wait for Monday’s episode to come out. See you then.