Word
collocation
Phoneticscol·lo·ca·tion
/kɑɫəˈkeɪʃən/
Definition
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.
Examples
“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.”
Examples
simple
“Fast food is a common collocation in English.”
contextual
“Learners often struggle with collocation, such as knowing why we say 'make a mistake' instead of 'do a mistake'.”
complex
“Mastering the nuances of lexical collocation is essential for achieving natural-sounding fluency, as these word pairings often defy simple grammatical rules.”
Usage
Often used in the context of language learning and corpus linguistics.
Pitfall
colocation
collocation
'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.
Etymology
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.
Domains
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/collocation