What is a collocation?

Compounds and idioms

Compounds are units of meaning formed with two or more words. Sometimes the words are written separately, sometimes they have a hyphen and sometimes they are written as one word. Usually the meaning of the compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. Some examples of compounds are car park, post office, narrow-minded, shoelaces, teapot.

It is not always easy to separate collocations and compounds and, where they are useful for learners or an important part of the vocabulary of a topic, we include some compounds in this book too.

Idioms are groups of words in a fixed order that have a meaning that cannot be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. For example, pass the buck is an idiom meaning ‘to pass responsibility for a problem to another person to avoid dealing with it oneself’. We deal with idioms in detail in the book English Idioms in Use in this series.