Collocation

Collocation simply means ‘putting beside’, or ‘placing with’. It means putting, or using, one word with another. Eg. “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.