Intermediate Vocabulary #collocations #true-or-false #native-vs-non-native

True or False — Does This IT Collocation Exist?

6 exercises — each question asks whether a given word combination is natural English or a non-native mistake. Many of these are almost right, which is what makes them tricky.

What is a collocation?

A collocation is a word pair that sounds natural to native speakers — not because of grammar rules, but because of convention. "Run a test" is natural; "do a test" is often not (in software). "Tight coupling" is correct; "hard coupling" is not.

  • Some expressions are grammatically valid but unnatural: ❌ "make a bug" → ✅ "introduce a bug"
  • In IT English, verbs are often surprising: you trigger a deployment, spin up a container, squash a bug
  • False friends from other languages cause many of these errors
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True or False: "run a test" is a natural English collocation used by professional developers.