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.

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

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.

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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

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