Through many years of proofreading excellent research papers, I have learned many an English word from non-native academics. So many in fact that I have often wondered how they developed such a rich vocabulary. After a time it dawned on me that their dictionaries, thesauruses, and translators were hard at work finding the perfect word. And while sometimes those tools came up with words that worked perfectly, other times, they just didn’t sound right to my native ear. And this usually boiled down to one thing: collocations.