dannyman.toldme.com

Collocation vs Colocation

This drives me insane. Part of the challenge is that most software dictionaries are unaware of the word “colocation” and are happy to offer “collocation” as an alternative, but that is wrong wrong wrong wrong and it makes me a little nuts every time.

So, here is some explanation I just sent to the NOC and copied to the Sales team of a “Colocation Provider” who keeps sending me messages from something called “Collocation Status Report”:

Dear NOC:

A collocation is a statistic used by linguists to determine the
frequency with which words and phrases are found together.

On your contact information page, there is an option to contact Sales
about “Colocation”

Assuming that you are indeed in the business of Colocation, and not
actually updating us on the status of word frequencies, please fix the
name in your outgoing envelope from “Collocation Status Reports” to
“Colocation Status Reports”

Thanks,
-danny

Yup. That’s all I have to say about that.