English Collocations: 150+ Common Word Pairs & Examples

A collocation is a pair or group of words that naturally go together in English, like make a mistake, heavy rain, take a photo or highly unlikely. Swapping in a synonym usually keeps the meaning but breaks the sound: people understand do a mistake or strong rain, yet they instantly hear it as non-native. The fastest way to sound natural is to learn words in these chunks, starting with the high-frequency pairs in the tables below.

This page lists more than 150 common English collocations grouped by pattern, explains the make/do/take/have confusion, shows the mistakes speakers of other languages make most often, and ends with a self-check quiz.

What counts as a collocation?

Collocations sit between free combinations and idioms. In a free combination, almost any word fits: you can see a car, buy a car, wash a car or sell a car. In an idiom, the meaning is not in the words at all: kick the bucket means die. A collocation is in the middle. Each word means what it normally means, but English has chosen a favorite partner.

Compare these near-synonyms. Fast and quick mean roughly the same thing, but English says fast food and a quick meal, a fast car and a quick look. Strong and powerful are close in meaning, yet we drink strong coffee and drive a powerful car. Nobody can derive these from grammar; they are simply the pairings that got repeated.

Collocations also vary in strength. Shrug your shoulders and grit your teeth are strong: the verb almost never appears with anything else. A big house is weak: big goes with hundreds of nouns. The strong and medium-strength pairs are the ones worth studying, because they are the ones you cannot guess.

Make, do, take and have: the core verb + noun collocations

Delexical verbs such as make, do, take, have and get carry little meaning of their own; the noun does the work. That is exactly why other languages pair them differently, and why these verbs cause more collocation errors than any other group.

Make

Make usually points to creating, producing or causing something.

Do

Do goes with work, tasks, duties and general activity, and with indefinite words such as something, nothing and anything.

Take

Take often describes accepting, using up or going through something.

Have and get

Have is used for meals, experiences and many everyday actions; get often signals a change of state.

More verb + noun collocations to know

These verbs are less "empty" than make and do, but they still combine with a narrow set of nouns.

Notice the pairs that clash with other languages: you tell a lie (not say a lie) and tell a joke, but you say hello and say a prayer.

Adjective + noun collocations

Adjectives are where learners reach for the dictionary synonym and land on the wrong one. Intensity is the biggest trap: English uses heavy, strong, high, deep and bitter for different nouns.

The middle column is a guide to typical learner errors, not a list of forbidden words. Big risk, for example, is common in conversation; high risk is the standard choice in reports, health writing and finance.

Adverb + adjective and adverb + verb collocations

Intensifying adverbs have strong preferences too. Very works everywhere, which is why it sounds flat when repeated; the pairs below are what fluent writers use instead.

Two useful patterns hide in this table. Absolute adjectives such as wrong, different, exhausted and impossible take completely, totally or utterly rather than very. Gradable adjectives such as concerned, likely and cold take very, extremely, deeply, highly or bitterly depending on the word.

Noun collocations and fixed quantity phrases

Uncountable nouns such as advice, information, news, furniture and luggage cannot take a or an directly, so English needs a partner noun: a piece of advice, a bit of news, an item of luggage.

Business and academic collocations

In professional writing, collocations signal competence faster than rare vocabulary does. Our guide to business English vocabulary goes deeper; these are the pairs that appear constantly in reports and email.

The most common collocation mistakes

These errors usually come from translating a pair directly from another language. If you speak Spanish, the Spanish-English false friends guide covers the related problem of words that look the same but mean something else.

British and American differences

Most collocations are shared, but a few differ. British speakers have a bath or have a shower where American speakers more often take one. Take a decision is correct in British English, especially in formal contexts, while Americans almost always make a decision. British English says do sport; American English says play sports. You can ring someone or phone someone in British English, while American English prefers call. None of these is wrong; just be consistent within one piece of writing.

How to learn collocations that stick

Record the chunk, not the word. When you meet decision, write down make a decision, reach a decision and a difficult decision. A notebook of single words produces correct-looking sentences that still sound off.

Build collocation grids around one noun. Pick a high-frequency noun and collect its verbs and adjectives. For problem: solve, cause, face, tackle, pose a problem; a serious, major, minor, persistent problem. One noun can hold ten useful pairs.

Notice them while reading. When a pair feels slightly surprising (a narrow escape, a golden opportunity), stop and note it. Pages built around one word, such as the Word of the Day, are a good place to spot the partners a word usually takes, because the example sentence shows it in action.

Test yourself with gap-fills. Recall is what moves a collocation from recognition into your own speech. Word games that force a choice in context help here; in WordFren, Context Match and the Recall fill-in-the-blank review ask you to supply the word that fits a real sentence, which is the same skill a collocation test measures.

Quick quiz: choose the natural partner

Try these before checking the answers below.

• I need to ___ a phone call. (do / make)
• The storm ___ a lot of damage. (did / made)
• Can you ___ a photo of the view? (make / take)
• We had to drive through ___ rain. (strong / heavy)
• It's ___ unlikely we'll finish today. (highly / strongly)
• He always ___ the truth. (says / tells)
• The meeting will ___ place on Monday. (take / have)
• The baby is fast ___. (sleeping / asleep)
• She's ___ aware of the problem. (fully / heavily)
• We finally ___ an agreement. (arrived / reached)

Answers: make, did, take, heavy, highly, tells, take, asleep, fully, reached.

If you got eight or more right, your ear for English pairs is already good, and the next step is widening your range with phrasal verbs and idioms and phrases. If you missed several make/do items, go back to those two tables and write one sentence of your own for each pair.