Meaning

(uncountable) The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds..

Definitions by Sense

1. (uncountable) The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
2. (countable) Such a specific grouping.
3. (linguistics, translation studies) A sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance (i.e., the statistically significant placement of particular words in a language), often representing an established name for, or idiomatic way of conveying, a particular semantic concept.
4. (mathematics) A method of finding an approximate solution of an ordinary differential equation L[y]=0 by determining coefficients in an expansion y(x)=y_0(x)+∑ₗ₌₀^qαₗy_l(x) so as to make L[y] vanish at prescribed points; the expansion with the coefficients thus found is the sought approximation.
5. (computing) A service allowing multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers, at a minimum of cost and complexity.

Example Sentences

Everything in fact depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Thus ngò tà ni means “I beat thee;” but ni tà ngò would mean “Thou beatest me.”

It drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion.

We said at first breāk fâst—“I broke fast at such an hour this morning:” he, or they, who first ventured to say I breakfasted were guilty of as heinous a violation of grammatical rule as he would be who should now declare I takedinnered, instead of I took dinner; but good usage came over to their side and ratified the blunder, because the community were minded to give a specific name to their earliest meal and to the act of partaking of it, and therefore converted the collocation breākfâst into the real compound brĕakfast.

Little and few are also incomplete negatives; note the frequent collocation with no: there is little or no danger.

[subtitle] One thousand English words and their pronunciation, together with information concerning the several meanings of each word, its inflections and derivatives, and the collocations and phrases into which it enters.

I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by ‘collocation’, and to apply the test of ‘collocability’.

Collocations of a given word are statements of the habitual or customary places of that word in a collocational order but not in any other contextual order and emphatically not in grammatical order

Word Forms

• collocations

Related Words

When Should You Use Collocation?

Use collocation when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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