The paper is aimed at the comparative research of variability of phraseological units (PUs) in modern English with the component ‘to give’ and of variability of phraseological units in modern Russian with the component ‘davat’. The research is based on the phraseological identification method proposed by A.V. Kunin, and the concept of variation developed by the scientist. The work also uses the method of comparative analysis of phraseological units, the method of contextual analysis of phraseological units, and the method of quantitative analysis of phraseological units. In the process of a comparative study of verbal phraseology in modern English and modern Russian, a number of phraseological variants were revealed: a) lexical-substantive variants of PU, lexical-adjectival variants of PU and lexical-prepositive variants of PU with corresponding variable lexemes-components; b) grammatical-morphological variants of PU, grammatical-syntactic variants of PU and mixed lexical-syntactic variants of PU; c) quantitative-lexical variants of PU and quantitative-syntactic variants of PU; d) mixed variants of PU. The results of the study are presented at the end of the work in a table that gives a general idea of the quantitative ratio of the identified variants of phraseological units and their types in the studied language material.