Two or more words that commonly occur together are called?

Two or more words that commonly occur together are called?

• A. Collocation
• B. Idiom
• C. Metaphor
• D. Register

Answer: (A)

Two or more words that commonly occur together are called collocations. In everyday English, certain pairings become natural through habitual usage, so we say “make a decision,” “heavy rain,” or “strong coffee” rather than pairing those words more loosely. Collocations cover a range of combinations, including adjective–noun, noun–noun, verb–adverb, and more, and they help speech and writing sound fluent and native-like because they mirror how language is actually used.

By contrast, an idiom is a set phrase whose overall meaning isn’t predictable from the individual words—like “spill the beans” meaning to reveal a secret. A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one thing in terms of another, such as “time is a thief.” Register refers to the level of formality or style, not to how words pair together. Recognizing collocations helps learners sound natural and understand heard or read language more quickly.