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Synonyms

collocation

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

noun

  • collocations
    plural
  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

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

It was a singular collocation or coincidence of circumstances, and painful as singular.

From The Finger of Fate A Romance by Mayne Reid

Nyâya-Vais`e@sika regarded all effects as being due to the assemblage of certain collocations which unconditionally, invariably, and immediately preceded these effects.

From A History of Indian Philosophy, Volume 1 by Surendranath Dasgupta

Along with any number of stationary antecedents, which are collocations, there must be at least one changing antecedent, which is a force.

From A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive by John Stuart Mill

The laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary collocations of data.

From The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

But the strict observance of position is in effect the strict avoidance of unclassical collocations of syllables: it is almost wholly negative.

From The Poems and Fragments of Catullus by Robinson Ellis

Her connection with Apollo arose possibly from a collocation of her cult with his in some place; in such collocations the goddess would become, in mythological constructions, the mother, sister, or wife of the god.

From Introduction to the History of Religions Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV by Morris Jastrow

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