A pair or group of words that naturally occur together, like 'heavy rain' or 'strong coffee'; the act of placing things side by side.
From Latin 'collocatio,' derived from 'collocare' (to place together). Became a linguistic term in the 1930s when scholars noticed words have preferred companions.
English has roughly 70,000 common collocations, and native speakers absorb them through exposure—that's why learning languages from textbooks alone leaves you sounding robotic; you need to absorb real collocations from native speakers.
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