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There are relatively few collocates dictionaries or lists, other
than what we have here. Some sites advertise
collocates dictionaries, but they are far too small to include
many collocates for many words (e.g. try smolder, adamantly,
commemorative, boundless, or ebb -- none of which is
found there, but all of which are found
(with many collocates) in our data -- with up to 300 collocates per
word).
With the
Oxford Collocations Dictionary, you would have to use their
interface to copy and paste the collocates -- word by word by word,
for tens of thousands of words. The other problem is that their data
is also quite sparse at times. For example, we took seven words completely at random
from our sample list (words ~11,000-12,000), and the following chart shows the number of collocates in our
lists and in their dictionary.
| |
| # in
file |
word |
PoS |
Our lists |
Oxford |
| 10201 |
chopper |
n |
300 |
0 |
| 10401 |
intrude |
v |
300 |
0 |
| 10501 |
slowdown |
n |
300 |
0 |
| 10601 |
audible |
j |
300 |
21 |
| 10901 |
chute |
n |
300 |
5 |
| 11001 |
unreliable |
j |
300 |
3 |
| 12101 |
baffle |
v |
300 |
1 |
|
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One other resource for collocates -- which we like very much
(overall) -- is
Sketch
Engine. However, there are important differences between our
lists and what you can retrieve from Sketch Engine:
-
Depending on use, Sketch Engine
can be very expensive --
several thousand dollars a year
in some cases.
Our lists are considerably
less expensive.
-
Most importantly, with our lists you can
download all 13.5 million collocate pairs at once. With Sketch Engine, you
must do it word ... by word ... by word -- for tens of thousands of
different words. This could take weeks or even months. With our data, you'll
have the entire list in a few minutes.
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