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Collocates provide information on word
meaning and usage, following the idea that "you can tell a lot about
a word by the words that it hangs out with". Let's look at
two quick examples. (Note that the collocates below are
grouped by part of speech and then sorted by frequency.)
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15589 brooding j
noun dark, eyes, look, silence, presence, sky, sense,
cloud, thought, mood, portrait, bird misc dark, over,
sit, silent, heavy, gray, stare, handsome,
mysterious, beneath, moody |
Suppose you find the word brooding
in a short story and you don't know what it means. You could
simply look it up in a dictionary, and you'd find a definition like
"cast in subdued light so as to convey a somewhat threatening
atmosphere". But the collocates lists provide
a much better and complete "word sketch". You can really "feel" the
meaning of this word by seeing what other words it occurs with.
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14644 sprawl
n
adjective urban, suburban, rural, industrial, metropolitan,
vast, unchecked, surrounding, Southern, increasing noun
city, development, traffic, growth, pollution, congestion,
land, town, farmland, county verb create, encourage,
stop, fight, reduce, curb, slow, threaten, limit, crawl |
A dictionary would tell you that sprawl
refers to "growth" or a "spreading out". But the collocates show
that it refers particularly to the growth of cities (city,
suburban, farmland), that it may be more common in the
Southern US, that it is associated with pollution and
congestion, and that people are trying to reduce, stop,
and fight against it.
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