Collocation

Collocation is the way in which words are associated with and are used together with other words.

For example, we use the verb complain with the prepositon about rather than for:

All words collocate to a certain extent. Like people, they tend to come together into the same groups again and again and they stand out when they are not in their usual place and surrounded by strangers.

There are no rules with collocation and learning which word goes where is a matter of reading and absorbing. It can often be useful to have students look at collocations when learning a new word in order not only to learn the meaning of the word, but also where it collocates. The system of finding how and where words collocate is called concordancing.