collocation
Americannoun
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the act of collocating.
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the state or manner of being collocated.
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the arrangement, especially of words in a sentence.
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Linguistics. a co-occurrence of lexical items, as perform with operation or commit with crime.
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
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.
See Examples For:
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 collocation, in this case, was piquant enough to beget a clever pasquinade, which was chalked up at street corners in Paris.
From Chaucer and His England by Coulton, G. G.
Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy and painstaking adroitness.
From Progress and History by Marvin, Francis Sydney
But collocations of stars are by no means limited to two.
From Astronomy of To-day A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language by Dolmage, Cecil Goodrich Julius
Derivative laws, when not casual, are almost always contingent on collocations 78 2.
From A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive 7th Edition, Vol. II by Mill, John Stuart
We piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly offensive little prigs.
From A Small Boy and Others by James, Henry
Now, the possibility of the occurrence of counteracting causes which do not arise from any of the conditions involved in the law itself depends on the original collocations.
From A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive by Mill, John Stuart
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
