Collocation Blog

What are collocations?

Why should I study them?

Words often appear to gether in "chunks". Without knowing that the words are meant to be read together as a "chunk" it makes it difficult to understand a sentence.

For example;

It is an uphill battle for students to learn collocations.

What are the key nouns? battle, collocations

What nouns appear with other words in a chunk? uphill battle

What does each word mean? uphill=going up a hill, battle=a big fight

What do they mean together? uphill battle=a very difficult or challenging fight

This blog, Collocation of the Week, teaches you lots of new collocations that might be useful for.

Searching for Collocations

Here is a website that lets you search for collocations. Type in a word you that you are interested in. It will give you a big list of collocations for that word.

For example, if you do a search for salt it will bring up the list of collocations. One of the most common collocations that this word appears in is salt and pepper.

Collocations are DRIVING ME CRAZY!

Collocations can be difficult to learn. Many student dictionaries do not list collocations. This website has the Oxford Collocations Dictionary on it (click on the Oxford Collocations link on the right side of the page).

For example:

If you want to know some collocations of crazy enter this word in the box and press search.

This will bring up this page below.

OXFORD Collocations dictionary for students of English
crazy adj.
1 mad/wild
VERBS be, seem, sound go I'd go crazy if I lived here. drive sb The group's performance always drives the audience crazy.
ADV. really absolutely, completely, totally a bit, half, a little, pretty, quite, slightly
PREP. with We were crazy with excitement.
2 very angry
VERBS be go drive sb The kids would answer back, and that drove her crazy.
ADV. absolutely, completely
PREP. at He was crazy at me for letting the goal in.

Notice the verbs in bold. Compare this to the title of this entry; Collocations are DRIVING ME CRAZY!