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Definition collocation

Etymology

1605. From Latin colloc?ti? < colloc?re. Compare French collocation.

The technical sense in linguistics was established 1951, although it may have been used this way earlier.

Noun

collocation (countable and uncountable, plural collocations)

1. (uncountable) The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.
2. (countable) Such a specific grouping.
3. (linguistics, translation studies) A sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance (i.e., the statistically significant placement of particular words in a language).
4. (mathematics) A method of finding an approximate solution of an ordinary differential equation ${\displaystyle L[y]=0}$ by determining coefficients in an expansion ${\textstyle y(x)=y_{0}(x)+\sum _{l=0}^{q}\alpha _{l}y_{l}(x)}$ so as to make ${\displaystyle L[y]}$ vanish at prescribed points; the expansion with the coefficients thus found is the sought approximation.
5. (computing) A service allowing multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear, connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers, with a minimum of cost and complexity.