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Compounds are units of meaning formed with two or more words. The words are usually written separately, but some may have a hyphen or be written as one word. Often the meaning of the compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. It is not always simple to detach collocations and compounds. car park; post office; narrow ...
In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom , where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.
The 9000 Most Important English Words to Learn have been highlighted via the Longman Communication 9000. The free online version was updated in 2008 and offers search (with spelling assistance), definitions, collocations, and many examples and illustrations.
Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
Collocative meaning, or "collocation", describes words that regularly appear together in common use (within certain contexts). Social meaning, where words are used to establish relationships between people and to delineate social roles. For example, in Japanese, the suffix "-san" when added to a proper name denotes respect, sometimes indicating ...
Collocations, e.g. motor vehicle, absolutely convinced. Institutionalized utterances, e.g. I'll get it, We'll see, That'll do, If I were you, Would you like a cup of coffee? Idioms, e.g. break a leg, was one whale of a, a bitter pill to swallow; Sayings, e.g. The early bird gets the worm, The devil is in the details; Sentence frames and heads, e.g.
Repetition uses the same word, or synonyms, antonyms, etc. For example, "Which dress are you going to wear?" – "I will wear my green frock," uses the synonyms "dress" and "frock" for lexical cohesion. Collocation uses related words that typically go together or tend to repeat the same meaning. An example is the phrase "once upon a time".
Phrasal verbs ordinarily cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts alone but must be considered as a whole: the meaning is non-compositional and thus unpredictable. [ a ] Phrasal verbs are differentiated from other classifications of multi-word verbs and free combinations by the criteria of idiomaticity, replacement ...