Collocation

Collocation

A collocation is a familiar grouping of words, especially words that habitually appear together and thereby convey meaning by association.

Collocational range refers to the set of items that typically accompany a word. The size of a collocational range is partially determined by a word's level of specificity and number of meanings.

The term collocation (from the Latin for "place together") was first used in its linguistic sense by British linguist John Rupert Firth (1890-1960), who famously observed, "You shall know a word by the company it keeps."