Collocation Finder

How to Use the Collocation Finder

1. Pick a pattern. Choose what you are looking for: nouns after a verb, verbs before a noun, verbs after a noun, adverbs before an adjective, or any word on either side.
2. Type one word. The label changes with the pattern — a verb for nouns after a verb, a noun for verbs before a noun. Results appear as you type.
3. Read the pairs. Each chip shows the two words in reading order, strongest pair first. Switch the order to alphabetical if you are scanning for a particular word.
4. Click to explore. Clicking a pair looks up its other word from its own side: from conduct research, you move to the verbs that come before research.

What a Collocation Is

A collocation is a combination of words that native speakers use together far more often than chance would predict. You make a decision but do a favour; you say heavy rain but strong tea; research is conducted, conclusions are drawn, and attention is paid. None of these pairs follows from the words' meanings alone, which is why they are hard to learn and easy to get slightly wrong. Swapping conduct for do in do a study is understandable but reads as less polished.

For academic writers, and especially for writers working in a second language, collocations are the difference between correct English and English that sounds natural. A thesis full of grammatical sentences can still feel off if the verbs never quite fit their nouns. Looking up the neighbours of a word is the quickest way to see which verb a field's writers reach for.

The Six Patterns

The pairs in the table are typical of what the tool returns, though exact ranks change slightly as the underlying data is updated. Adjective–noun pairs are the job of the Describing Words Finder, which also lets you work from either word.

Where the Pairs Come From, and Their Limits

The tool asks Datamuse, a word-finding service, which words appear immediately to the left or right of yours. Datamuse's answer is built from counts of word pairs in the Google Books Ngrams corpus, a large collection of published books. These are statistics, not editorial judgements: a pair is ranked higher because it occurs more often, not because it is better style. Four limits are worth knowing.

• Only adjacent words count. Make a decision has an article between its verb and noun, so it appears when you search the verb make (nouns such as decisions) rather than when you search decision.
• Grammar words are hidden by default. Counts for the, of and is dominate every list, so they are filtered out unless you tick the box.
• Parts of speech are loose. Datamuse tags words with their likely word classes, and many English words are both noun and verb. A pair can appear under the wrong heading, such as research institute among the verbs, and irregular forms like drew may be missed.
• One word has many senses. The corpus does not know which sense you mean: conduct returns conduct research and conduct electricity, and also the psychology term conduct disorder.

Using Collocations in Your Writing

Start from the word you are surest of, usually the noun, and look at the verbs that go with it. In the finder, attention returns pay, draw, attract and focus; evidence returns give, provide, find and show. Pick the pair that carries the meaning you want, then check your discipline's own papers for the form it prefers. A collocation that is common in all of English can still be uncommon in a particular field.

When a pair does not exist, that tells you something too. If a verb never shows up beside your noun, you may be reaching for a literal translation from another language. The Academic Vocabulary Checker and the Transition Word Finder help with the next layer up: choosing the formal words and linking phrases themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a collocation?

A collocation is a pair or group of words that are habitually used together, such as make a decision, heavy rain or conduct research. The combination is conventional rather than logical: English speakers say strong tea and not powerful tea, though both adjectives mean something similar. Learning collocations is a large part of sounding fluent.

What are the most useful collocations for academic writing?

Verb and noun pairs matter most: conduct research, draw conclusions, provide evidence, raise a question, support an argument, address a problem. Adverb and adjective pairs such as statistically significant and highly effective come next. Use this tool on your own key nouns to find the ones your topic needs.

Where do the results come from?

They come from Datamuse, which ranks the words that appear next to your word using counts of word pairs in the Google Books Ngrams corpus. The ranking reflects how often a pair occurs in published books, so it favours common usage over rare or very new phrasing.

Why can't I find make a decision by searching decision?

The tool only counts words that sit directly beside the one you type. In make a decision the word a is in between, so the pair is found from the verb: search make and look for decisions. Searching a noun finds verbs that come directly before it, with no article.

Why do some results look wrong?

Many English words are both nouns and verbs, and the corpus does not say which way a given pair uses them. A word may therefore show up under the wrong part of speech, or be missing if Datamuse tags it differently. Treat the list as a set of leads to check, and use the any-word patterns when the filtered lists look thin.

Is a collocation the same as an idiom?

No. A collocation can be understood from its parts: pay attention is easy to follow once you know the pairing. An idiom's meaning cannot be worked out from its words, as with spill the beans. The Idiom Finder covers those fixed expressions.

Is the word I search sent to a server?

Yes. Each lookup goes to CitationEasy's server, which asks the Datamuse word service and keeps answers in a cache so repeat searches are fast. Nothing else you type on the page is sent, and no account is needed.