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Showing results for collocation. Search instead for co-location.
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 ) ( 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

There was a fine shade of flattery in the collocation that touched the lawyer.

From Luttrell Of Arran Complete by Lever, Charles James