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Many words are often used in combination with certain other words. For example, beautiful is more often applied to woman than man, while handsome is more often used with man than woman:

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Is there a resource, ideally online, ideally free, that lists the most frequent co-occuring words or collocations?

For example, the German Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache lists the most frequent words that have certain syntactic functions for a word (attribute, object, preposition etc.). Here is the top of the page for Baum "tree", for example:

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Google Books Ngram Viewer finds only the ten most frequent words that appear immediately before or after a word, if you use the asterisk in the search, but no more, e.g. for woman:

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That's often not very useful, as the most frequent words are often the same for all words of the same grammatical class (e.g. the, an/a, of, one etc. before nouns). Are there other, better ressources, similar to that German dictionary, for English?

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I use English-Corpora.org, which is free, but rate limited and requires an account. COCA and BNC are the most useful.

You can do basic searches, like * woman, more complicated searches like ADJ WOMAN (adjectives before any form of "woman"), or a proper collocation search (which includes nearby and not just adjacent words; click + to expand the menu and then go to Collocates).

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    It's easier to use if, from the search screen, you go to Word — not + > Collocates. Enter your word (e.g. handsome) on the word screen and then from the results screen, go to Collocates (at the top of the screen). Commented Oct 17, 2024 at 0:01
  • If you go to the Lancaster version of the BNC (linked-to in first comments under the question), you do not have the same restrictions -i.e. is not so 'limited'. Commented Oct 17, 2024 at 17:34

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