Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of collocating or the state of being collocated.
  • noun An arrangement or juxtaposition of words or other elements, especially those that commonly co-occur, as rancid butter, bosom buddy, or dead serious.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of collocating or placing together; disposal in a certain order with something else; an arranging.
  • noun The state of being placed or ordered along with something else; the manner in which a thing is placed with regard to something else; disposition; arrangement; connection: as, in this collocation the sense of the word is clear.
  • noun In civil law, the allocation among creditors of the proceeds of a judicial sale, in satisfaction of their claims; also, the schedule prepared by the court showing the amount due to each.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of placing; the state of being placed with something else; disposition in place; arrangement.
  • noun (Linguistics) a combination of related words within a sentence that occurs more frequently than would be predicted in a random arrangement of words; a combination of words that occurs with sufficient frequency to be recongizable as a common combination, especially a pair of words that occur adjacent to each other. Also called stable collocation. Combinations of words having intervening words between them, such as verb and object pairs, may also be collocations.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
  • noun countable Such a specific grouping.
  • noun linguistics, translation studies The statistically significant collocation of particular words in a language.
  • noun mathematics A method of determining coefficients in an expansion so as to nullify the values of an ordinary differential equation at prescribed points.
  • noun computing A service allowing multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear, connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers, with a minimum of cost and complexity.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a grouping of words in a sentence
  • noun the act of positioning close together (or side by side)

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

1605. From Latin collocātiōnem < collocāre. Compare French collocation.

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Examples

  • I tend to think that seeing and characterising them as collocation is the most useful way, a pragmatic view perhaps encouraged by the lexical approach.

    P is for Phrasal Verb « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • So also in 2Co 2: 15, 16. us which are saved -- In the Greek the collocation is more modest, "to them that are being saved (that are in the way of salvation) as," that is, to which class we belong. power of God -- which includes in it that it is the wisdom of God "(1Co

    Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible 1871

  • This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable portions alternating; that would be described as collocation; no; the incoming entity goes through the other to the very minutest point — an impossibility, of course; the less becoming equal to the greater; still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout.

    The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

  • Be sure to inquire about value added services such as collocation space and terrestrial connectivity.

    Figures Terrestrial | SciFi, Fantasy & Horror Collectibles 2009

  • Hence, when sufficient energy to account for any effect cannot be found in the inciting power, or manifestly active condition, we must look for it in the collocation which is often supposed to be passive.

    Logic Deductive and Inductive Carveth Read 1889

  • In the way water is one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen and a property of "wetness" emerges, it is imagined that objective moral obligations emerge from a similar kind of collocation of natural properties.

    Ochuk's blog 2008

  • Obviously, if you need more power, Fat Jack Hosting offers also dedicated severs (up to 320GB of space and 1Tbyte of bandwidth) and an interesting formula named "collocation": practically, if you have a data center (from single rack to entire cabinet) BUT you don't want to manage it (managing cost can be extremely high), you can ask Fat Jack Hosting to do this for you (you can use the data centers in Atlanta, St Louis, Texas, Indianapolis and New York).

    Archive 2008-07-01 2008

  • Here’s the biggest problem, they don’t understand collocation.

    p2pnet World Headlines – April 3, 2009 2009

  • The FBI just raided another Dallas collocation facility, same 5: AM raid, same special agent, and apparently a related “cause”.

    p2pnet World Headlines – April 3, 2009 2009

  • The collocation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the swearing in of the country's first black president has occasioned much discourse on the state of race relations in the U.S., most of it somehow centered around whether we're in a "post-racial" society or not.

    Archive 2009-01-01 Matthew Guerrieri 2009

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