collocation

noun

1. (uncountable)The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.

   “Everything in fact depends in Chinese on the proper collocation of words in a sentence. Thus ngò tà ni means “I beat thee;” but ni tà ngò would mean “Thou beatest me.””

   “It drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion.”

2. (countable)Such a specific grouping.
3. (countable, uncountable)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), often representing an established name for, or idiomatic way of conveying, a particular semantic concept.

   “Little and few are also incomplete negatives; note the frequent collocation with no: there is little or no danger.”

   “[subtitle] One thousand English words and their pronunciation, together with information concerning the several meanings of each word, its inflections and derivatives, and the collocations and phrases into which it enters.”

   “I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by ‘collocation’, and to apply the test of ‘collocability’.”

   “Collocations of a given word are statements of the habitual or customary places of that word in a collocational order but not in any other contextual order and emphatically not in grammatical order”

   “The problem here was the translation of "period" by German "Periode". In describing the symptoms we may say that in connection with "Schlaf" the German word "Phase" would have been a better collocation.”

4. (countable, uncountable)A method of finding an approximate solution of an ordinary differential equation L[y]=0 by determining coefficients in an expansion y(x)=y_0(x)+∑ₗ₌₀^qαₗy_l(x) so as to make L[y] vanish at prescribed points; the expansion with the coefficients thus found is the sought approximation.
5. (countable, uncountable)A service allowing multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers, at a minimum of cost and complexity.

   “As usual, nothing of significance will be asked, and most certainly, answered, but do expect the dollar (and, inversely, ES) to go up, then down, then up, and so forth as random vacuum tubes blow in NYSE's ultramodern Mahwah collocation facility.”