Collocation Meaning
/ˌkɒl.əˈkeɪ.ʃən/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
nounThe grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
nounSuch a specific grouping.
Sentence Examples
A collocation consists of words that are often found together.
That's not a common collocation in French.
CEFR Practice Quiz
In linguistics, a ____ like 'strong coffee' sounds natural to native speakers.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
A ____ is a sequence of words that often occur together today.
Word Origin & History
Learned borrowing from Latin collocātiō (“a putting together”). By surface analysis, col- (“together”) + location. The technical sense in linguistics was established in 1951, although it may actually be earlier. First attested in 1605.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"It drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion."
— 1931, H. P. Lovecraft, chapter 6, in The Whisperer in Darkness:
"Little and few are also incomplete negatives; note the frequent collocation with no: there is little or no danger."
— 1917, Otto Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages, Copenhagen: A.F. Høst, page 39:
"[subtitle] One thousand English words and their pronunciation, together with information concerning the several meanings of each word, its inflections and derivatives, and the collocations and phrases into which it enters."
— 1938, H.E. Palmer, A Grammar of English Words, Longmans, Green:
"I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by ‘collocation’, and to apply the test of ‘collocability’."
— 1951, John Rupert Firth, Papers in linguistics, 1934–1951, Oxford University Press, page 194:
"Collocations of a given word are statements of the habitual or customary places of that word in a collocational order but not in any other contextual order and emphatically not in grammatical order"
— 1968, John Rupert Firth, Frank Robert Palmer, Selected Papers of J.R. Firth, 1952-1959, Longmans, page 181:
Explore More C1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
In linguistics, a ____ like 'strong coffee' sounds natural to native speakers.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
A ____ is a sequence of words that often occur together today.