Are there any differences between "I put the clothes on" and "I put on the clothes"?

Solution 1:

Put on is a phrasal verb, and transitive phrasal verbs such as this allow movement of the particle, on in this case, when the object is not a pronoun. If the sentences describe the act of dressing, then the meaning is the same.

There may, however, be a difference between British and American English in the choice between the two. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 23 records for ‘put on my clothes’, but only 9 for ‘put my clothes on’. The British National Corpus has one record for each. These results are not necessarily conclusive, particularly given the virtually insignificant returns from the BNC, but they suggest a tendency which might merit further investigation.