There are many definitions of collocation. We think of collocations in the same way as expressed by Benson et al.: "In any language, certain words combine with certain other words or grammatical constructions. These recurrent, semi-fixed combinations, or collocations, can be divided into two groups: grammatical collocations and lexical collocations."

Enter this collection to search for the company words keep. How words form into collocational patterns will be revealed by looking across the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) reference corpus, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of 2500 university student writing texts and the Wikipedia crowd-sourced corpus of three million articles.

Featuring:

• The Wikipedia Miner Toolkit, based on artificial intelligence designs, for searching across the corpora and presenting collocations in a user-friendly interface.
• The Cherry Basket for saving collocations from across the corpora using the Cherry Picking function, and where collocations can be stored for re-use and printed or saved as export files.
• Game-based activities for playing with collocations and advancing your English proficiency.

Reference: Benson, M. Benson, E., Ilsen, R.F. (1986). The BBI combinatory dictionary of English: A guide to word combinations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.