Collocation Collection

If you are working to improve your vocabulary and you want to sound more native through the use of common word combinations, then it will be extremely useful to learn more about collocations and perhaps invest in a collocation reference book. 

What is a collocation? I like to think of collocations as "word partnerships".  Certain words go well together in phrases.  These "partners" are commonly used together by native speakers and are expected to be used together.  Some collocations, such as phrasal verbs and idioms are better understood by non-native English speakers but the more challenging collocation partners like noun/preposition combinations and adjective/noun combinations can be challenging to remember and use effectively.



Let's look at all the collocations in the following news story:

LONDON (AP) — British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.

Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled 'C. Darwin Esq."

"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.

Falcon-Lang's find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including John Hooker — a botanist and dear friend of Darwin — and the Rev. John Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.

The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution.

Notice all the phrasal verbs (peer into, hold up, pick up) in this passage.  They are quite common in spoken English and although they are less common in written English, they are often used in news stories and informal writing so it is important to be familiar with them.  The other highlighted examples include preposition collocations, such as "scores of" and "expedition on".  A familiarity with collocations will allow you to choose the best prepositions for clear and accurate phrases.

Some other examples like "dear friend" and "inner circle" are adjective noun collocations. This type of partnership is often the most challenging to understand and use effectively.  These words are often used together and substitutions are not as effective.  The writer could have used "close friend" or "good friend" but not "special friend" or "nice friend" because these words are not collocations.

Native speakers understand collocations intuitively because of years of experience.  They know what "sounds right".  English learners can use "noticing" (see previous entry) to learn these word partners and incorporate them into your English usage.

An excellent reference for learning collocations is the Oxford Collocations Dictionary. 
There are also websites with collocation exercises where you can test your knowledge and learn more.  Try some of these:
Better English Collocations
Take, Have and Break Collocations
Medical Collocations
Vocabulary Power Links

Paying attention to collocations and incorporating strongly collocated word partnerships into your English will go a long way toward improving your communication skills and your impression on other communicators.