# collocation

/kɑɫəˈkeɪʃən/ (US) · CEFR C1 · Noun

Source: https://englishreference.com/word/collocation
Updated: 2026-08-02

## Definition

a group of words that often go together naturally in a language. Using these makes your speech sound more like a native speaker.

For teachers: 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.

## Pitfalls

- Not "colocation" but "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.

## Usage notes

- Often used in the context of language learning and corpus linguistics.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.