500 English Collocations: The Word Pairs That Make You Sound Natural

The reason is almost always a collocation — a pair of words the language insists on. You make a decision; you do not do one. Rain is heavy; wind is strong; and the two cannot be swapped, although nothing about their meanings explains why.

This is five hundred of those pairs, in fifty groups of ten.

Every entry gives you four things: the pairing, what it means in one line, a sentence using it, and — the column that does the real work — the wrong version people reach for instead, marked with a cross.

Part One — the ten verbs that carry English. Make, do, take, get, have, give, go, put, come and keep. None of them means much on its own, and between them they do more work than any other hundred words in the language.

Part Two — at work. Meetings, email, deadlines, budgets, customers, hiring, problems, approval, presentations and managing people. A hundred pairings that appear in every working week, in every industry.

Part Three — people, feelings and opinions. Where collocation matters most, because the difference between two phrasings is not correctness but temperature. I disagree and I take your point, but say the same thing and land completely differently.

Part Four — the words that go with words. Heavy rain and strong wind. Deep concern and high standards. Bitterly cold, highly likely, perfectly clear. The pairings no rule covers.

Part Five — ordinary life. Travel, food, home, shopping, driving, weather, study, technology, sport and finding your way around a town.

And at the back, the pages you will keep returning to:

• The fifty worth learning first, if your time is short

• Make or do? — the commonest confusion in English, with forty-four nouns settled

• Sixty verb-and-preposition pairs: depend on, consist of, result in, apply for

• When the article changes the meaning: in hospital and in the hospital are not the same thing

• All five hundred listed alphabetically, for when you know the phrase and want to check it

Where British and American usage differ, both are given and neither is marked wrong. Do the washing-up and do the dishes are both entirely standard English.

500 pairings · 50 groups · 500 example sentences · 500 wrong versions to unlearn