collocation
n.n. a group of words that often go together naturally in a language. Using these makes your speech sound more like a native speaker.
n. a habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance.
Fast food is a common collocation in English.
Learners often struggle with collocation, such as knowing why we say 'make a mistake' instead of 'do a mistake'.
Mastering the nuances of lexical collocation is essential for achieving natural-sounding fluency, as these word pairings often defy simple grammatical rules.
Learned borrowing from Latin collocātiō (“a putting together”). By surface analysis, col- (“together”) + location. The technical sense in linguistics was established in 1951, although it may actually be earlier. First attested in 1605.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Often used in the context of language learning and corpus linguistics.
colocationcollocation'Colocation' (one L) means housing servers in a shared data centre. The linguistics term for words that naturally go together is 'collocation', with two Ls.
Last updated August 2, 2026