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Synonyms

collocation

American  
[kol-uh-key-shuhn] / ˌkɒl əˈkeɪ ʃən /

noun

  1. the act of collocating.

  2. the state or manner of being collocated.

  3. the arrangement, especially of words in a sentence.

  4. Linguistics. a co-occurrence of lexical items, as perform with operation or commit with crime.


collocation British  
/ ˌkɒləˈkeɪʃən /

noun

  1. a grouping together of things in a certain order, as of the words in a sentence

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

  • collocational adjective
  • collocative adjective

Etymology

Origin of collocation

1595–1605; < Latin collocātiōn- (stem of collocātiō ), equivalent to collocāt ( us ) ( see collocate) + -iōn- -ion

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Also, “hyperscalers and collocation companies are expected to invest about $7 trillion in data center infrastructure globally over the course of 2025 to 2030, with about $800 billion going towards electrical equipment and mechanical equipment.”

From Barron's • Feb. 23, 2026

Linguists call it collocation: the likelihood of two words occurring together.

From The Guardian • Jan. 27, 2016

It’s a work of journalism that never felt like journalism, a collocation of short quotes, a book that’s both joyful and angry, a book to get lost in.

From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 20, 2016

Notably, the script used to analyze the texts relied on modified versions of four of the Natural Language Toolkit’s prepackaged modules: the word tokenizer, part of speech tagger, WordNetLemmatizer, and collocation finder.

From Scientific American • Nov. 26, 2012

The Evangelists seldom speak of our Lord's motives, but here the collocation indicates that it was this confederacy of Pharisees and Herodians which caused our Lord to leave Capernaum.

From Pastor Pastorum by Latham, Rev. Henry