collocation

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

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

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act of collocating or placing together; disposal in a certain order with something else; an arranging.
2. n. 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.
3. n. 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.

Wiktionary

1. n. The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
2. n. Such a specific grouping.
3. n. 1880, William Dwight Whitney, Richard Morris, Language and its study, with especial reference to the Indo-European family, 2nd ed, Trübner & Co, p 56:
4. n. We said at first breāk fâst—“I broke fast at such an hour this morning:” he, or they, who first ventured to say I breakfasted were guilty of as heinous a violation of grammatical rule as he would be who should now declare I takedinnered, instead of I took dinner; but good usage came over to their side and ratified the blunder, because the community were minded to give a specific name to their earliest meal and to the act of partaking of it, and therefore converted the collocation breākfâst into the real compound brĕakfast.
5. n. The statistically significant collocation of particular words in a language.
6. n. A method of determining coefficients in an expansion y(x) = y_(x) + \sum_^\alpha_ y_(x) so as to nullify the values of an ordinary differential equation L[y(x)]=0 at prescribed points.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act of placing; the state of being placed with something else; disposition in place; arrangement.
2. n. 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.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a grouping of words in a sentence
2. n. the act of positioning close together (or side by side)