Collocations

You may or may not be a native English speaker but if you landed on this page it means that you are an ardent English learner. And as English learner it is very important to know what collocations are.

You might notice that some words become jargons of a language. Like they always come together and are spoken together as well. For you to get complete command of a language you must learn its jargons or collocations in our case.

In today’s article, I will discuss about collocations, what they actually means and some common examples of them for you to remember.

Collocation

The dictionary definition of collocations is two or more words that usually occur together in sentences and make sense with each other. In other words, the words that go together are called collocations.

Example

Sam did his homework.

In the above simple sentence we use did with homework because one always do his homework and never make or go homework. Thus did his homework is an example of a collocation.

Strong Collocations

The collocations are known to be strong if the words that occur together only make sense when they are used together and become meaningless if used with some other words.

The above example is an example of a strong collocation.

Example

I made tea with lemon and herbs.

Now this is another example of a strong collocation as the tea is always made.

Verb-Noun Collocations

The most commonly used collocations in English language include verb-noun collocations. This type of collocations uses a verb and a noun that always occur together. For example be prepared, take risk, give advice, make progress, draw contract, withdraw money etc.

Common Terms

Another type of collocations is the common terms or expressions that are always used together and are not a verb-noun combination. These common terms are generally used to express the feelings of a person regarding a particular thing. They make use of a strengthening word/intensifier and a verb instead of a noun and verb.

Example:

He can go to great lengths for me.

The above example uses the collocation go to great lengths. As you can see go is the verb here and great is the intensifier of the noun lengths so this is a common expression or term collocation.

Some other examples of this type of collocations are deeply regret the loss of…../ be in utter fury about ……/ very disappointed in ……/ negatively impact …… etc.