Meaning & use
colligate
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To bind or group facts or ideas together, especially by identifying a general principle that connects them; also, in linguistics, to habitually co-occur with certain grammatical patterns.
See it in a sentence
The scientist tried to colligate scattered observations into a single unifying theory.
In corpus linguistics, the verb "cause" tends to colligate with negative outcomes.
A note on using this word
Coined by philosopher William Whewell in the 19th century for the scientific act of binding facts together under a theory; linguists later borrowed it for grammatical patterning.
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