What is Collocation?

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What is collocation?

A collocation is a group of words which frequently go or collocate together. They're used in ordinarily everyday situation by native speakers.

Collocations are not just a matter of how adjectives combine with nouns. They can refer

to any kind of typical word combination. Here are some examples of collocation form.

verb + noun (e.g. arouse someone’s interest, lead a seminar),
adverb + adjective (e.g. fundamentally different),
adverb + verb (e.g. ﬂatly contradict),
noun + noun (e.g. a lick of paint, a team of experts, words of wisdom).

There is much more about different grammatical types of collocation.

Phrasal verbs (e.g. come up with, run up, adhere to) and compound nouns (e.g. economy
drive, stock market) are sometimes described as types of collocations.

However, we consider them as individual lexical items and so include them here only in combination with something else, e.g. come up with a suggestion, run up a hill, adhere to your principles, go on an economy drive, play the stock market.

It can be difficult for learners of English to know which words collocate, as natural collocation
are not always logical or guessable. There is, for example, no obvious reason why we say
making friends rather than getting fiends or heavy rain, not strong rain. not strong rain.

Learners also need to know when specific collocations are appropriate. This is usually referred to by linguists as knowing which register to use. A light from a bus is a formal collocation used in notices and other official context.

In everyday situations we would, of course, always talk about getting off a bus, getting on the bus, taking the bus, missing the bus.

Below are common collocation that you will find in everyday usage. These group of word collocate with do, make, have, take, go and get:

do someone a favour (=to help someone)
do your hair/nails/make-up etc (=to do something that improves your appearance)
do the shopping
do your best
do your homework
do the dishes (=to wash/clean the dishes)
do your taxes