How to use collocation in a sentence
11 example sentences · noun
Collocation means the grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds. Example: “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.”
Examples of collocation by meaning
nounThe grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
- 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
nounA sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance (i.e., the statistically...
- 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
- 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 order1968, John Rupert Firth, Frank Robert Palmer, Selected Papers of J.R. Firth, 1952-1959, Longmans, page 181
More sentences with collocation
- MI excludes words that frequently combine with many words (e.g. the), but can overemphasize low frequency collocation.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific…. From the entry mi
- Wordnets include words of the natural language, collocations and various relations between them.1999, Leo Hadacz, "Semantic Inference in the Human-Machine Communication", in Václav Matoušek, ed., Text, Speech and Dialogue: Second…. From the entry wordnets
- A list of collocations to accompany the SVL words providing their important lexico-grammatical associations could therefore be a useful supplementary resource.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific…. From the entry collocate
- Furthermore, the current study goes beyond previous wordlist development by contributing accompanying pedagogical lists containing word associations (i.e. collocations) and word families.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific…. From the entry word family
- What an incredible, head-reeling collocation of cultures: Islamic texts sprawling on the Great Wall, a twelve-legged god looking down in exophthalmic frowning benevolence.1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 528. From the entry exophthalmic
- I think I notice the recurrence of favorite collocations and rhythms, but don’t challenge me — along with great magic power a suggestion of formula.1923 November 10, O[liver] W[endell] Holmes [Jr.], edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe, Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice…. From the entry tremendosity
- Thus, in this introit to the songs of redemptive self-annihilation, the poet already juxtaposes in these oxymorous collocations words that intimate the paradox of his self-sacrifice.1993, Zeitschrift für Afrikastudien, page 32. From the entry oxymorous
Meaning of collocation
- noun The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
- noun Such a specific grouping.
- noun A sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance (i.e., the statistically significant placement of particular words in a language), often representing an established name for, or idiomatic way of conveying, a particular semantic concept.
Questions about collocation in a sentence
- How do you use collocation in a sentence?
- Collocation is used as a noun. For example: “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.”
- What is a short sentence with collocation?
- “Wordnets include words of the natural language, collocations and various relations between them.”
- What does collocation mean?
- Collocation means the grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: collocation (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this page: “How to use collocation in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/collocation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.