CollocateWord for the Wise June 05, 2007 Broadcast Topic: Collocate A woman highly skeptical of the language used by bureaucrats checked in with us about a word she considered suspect: collocate.
She told us she had come across plenty of (and we quote) errors of usage, punctuation, spelling, and so on in a publication by a federal agency and was looking to doublecheck that collocate is indeed an acceptable term to describe being located in the same spot.
(来源：http://www.
2hzz.
com)It was a colluctation to keep our pleasure at her question under control, since her query provides us with the perfect opportunity to collect our thoughts about co-locations and collocations.
But we'll begin by explaining colluctation: that little-used synonym of struggle shares the Latin luctari ancestor (meaning to struggle; wrestle) with reluctant.
The col- prefix goes back one more generation, to the C-O-M that means with; jointly; together.
When that prefix is combined with a word beginning with B, P, or M, it retains its C-O-M spelling (as in commingle); combined with an R sound, C-O-M is turned into C-O-R (correlate); and when it is paired with an L sound—as in locate—C-O-M turns into C-O-L, and we get collocate, meaning to set or arrange in a place or position, especially side by side; to occur in conjunction with something.