collocation

[ kol-uh-key-shuhn ]

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.

Other Words From

• collo·cation·al collo·cative adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of collocation¹

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

Example Sentences

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

From The Guardian

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

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

Meanwhile, in California… Evernote Corporation has been growing its share of the “outboard brain” online collocation and storage market since its launch in 2008.

From Forbes

Although there was never a law against women serving in ground combat, the “intent of the law” was to prohibit it, so the collocation rules were made.

From Time

Related Words

• allocation
• allotment
• analysis
• arrangement
• coordination
• designation
• distribution
• grade
• regulation