Definitions

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

  • intransitive verb To place together or in proper order; arrange side by side.
  • intransitive verb To occur in a collocation. Used of words.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To set or place together.
  • In civil law, to allocate or allot (the proceeds of a judicial sale) among creditors, in satisfaction of their claims.
  • Set or placed together.

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

  • adjective obsolete Set; placed.
  • transitive verb To set or place; to set; to station.

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

  • verb linguistics, translation studies (said of certain words) To be often used together, form a collocation; for example strong collocates with tea.
  • verb rare To arrange or occur side by side.
  • verb obsolete, transitive To set or place; to station.
  • noun linguistics A component word of a collocation.

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

  • verb have a strong tendency to occur side by side
  • verb group or chunk together in a certain order or place side by side

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin collocāre, collocāt- : com-, com- + locāre, to place; see locate.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin collocāt-, ppl. stem of collocō.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word collocate.

Examples

  • Often the clandestine decision to "collocate" a shiny new school in a hell-hole building is the first step toward closing a neighboring school.

    Michele Somerville: The NYC DOE Needs an A-Team Michele Somerville 2011

  • Note how often they collocate with verbs like claim, deny, suggest, suspect, as well as with modals like may.

    July « 2010 « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • Often the clandestine decision to "collocate" a shiny new school in a hell-hole building is the first step toward closing a neighboring school.

    Michele Somerville: The NYC DOE Needs an A-Team Michele Somerville 2011

  • Often the clandestine decision to "collocate" a shiny new school in a hell-hole building is the first step toward closing a neighboring school.

    Michele Somerville: The NYC DOE Needs an A-Team Michele Somerville 2011

  • Note how often they collocate with verbs like claim, deny, suggest, suspect, as well as with modals like may.

    Q is for Quote marks « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • Often the clandestine decision to "collocate" a shiny new school in a hell-hole building is the first step toward closing a neighboring school.

    Michele Somerville: The NYC DOE Needs an A-Team Michele Somerville 2011

  • To be fair to Yule, he also includes dancing, swimming and skiing in his list of verbs that collocate with like, but I agree that with “I like dancing/swimming/skiing” there is a stronger implication that I am the performer.

    G is for Gerund « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • That sophisticated computers select the best words and collocate them in the best order.

    Archive 2009-12-01 2009

  • That sophisticated computers select the best words and collocate them in the best order.

    The permanent home of language 2009

  • Also, I hope to use this blog to collocate some of the important papers, articles, websites, etc. that deal with the future of cataloging and metadata

    April 2007 2007

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.