Collocation

Collocation simply means 'putting beside', or 'placing with'. It means putting, or using, one word with another. Some words change their meanings depending on their collocations. 'Socialist' is usually a term for a left-wing politician. In collocation with 'National', it becomes the name of a right-wing party - shortened, in Germany in the 1930s, to 'Nazi'.

Collocation is a technical term in linguistics and related fields of language study. It can be useful when one is looking at language - it may seem like useless jargon outside this field.