Announcing New Greek and Latin Collocations

23 December 2002

Perseus has had collocation tables for Greek for several years. When collocation was first implemented, however, the Latin corpus was not large enough to give statistically significant results.

Since then, we have added many Latin texts: Terence, Caesar's Civil War, the Vulgate, more Horace, more Ovid, Sulpicia, Phaedrus, Tacitus. The Perseus Latin corpus is now over 4,000,000 words, quite large enough for meaningful collocations. The Greek corpus has grown as well, with the addition in particular of Hellenistic texts.

We have therefore updated the collocation information for both languages. To see collocation information for a word, look up that word in the Greek or Latin lexicon. You will see a list of significant co-occurring words in the entire Perseus corpus, in prose, and in poetry. You can go from there to a full collocation table, showing all the words associated with the given work in the given corpus. The full table also allows you to look at smaller corpora: drama, rhetoric, and so on. Use these results with caution, because these subsets of the full Perseus corpora may be too small to yield statistically signifcant results.

Collocations are words that are frequently used together. For example, in English, we might speak of "lions and tigers" but much less often of "lions and jaguars." Thus "tiger" is a collocate of "lion" but "jaguar" is not. Collocations can also help tell apart different senses of a word. If the word "jaguar" occurs in a group of texts associated with "roar," "tail," and "spot," it probably refers to the South American feline. But if the collocates are "engine," "Ferrari," and "racetrack," then this Jaguar is probably a car marque.

See the collocations help page for more information.

Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.