It has to be admitted that there are far too few collocations dictionaries around.

In Great Britain the Cobuild Collocations Dictionary is eagerly awaited.

It is clear that collocations dictionaries and synonym differentiators may not exist at all in a particular language community: in fact, very few language communities can boast of such resources.

Collocations dictionaries published in Russia for advanced L2 learners of Russian date back a quarter of a century or so and have developed a very high degree of variety and sophistication over the intervening years.

Notwithstanding the logistic difficulties of constructing synonym differentiators and collocations dictionaries, particularly the latter, it is now possible for information technology to deliver direct to socalled end-users lexical data retrieval systems of great size, power, and usefulness.

In Germany the nearest thing to a straight collocations dictionary is E. Agricola's regularly republished Wörter und Wendungen , written for Germans but highly valuable for foreigners using German at an advanced level.

The main general collocations dictionary is Slovar' sochetaemosti slov russkogo yazyka Russian Word-combinatory Dictionary), by P.N. Denisov and V.V. Markovkin (Russki Yazyk, 1983).

These include dictionaries of phrasal verbs, such as the Oxford Phrasal Verbs Dictionary (2nd edition, Oxford University Press: 2006), and dictionaries of collocation, such as Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (Oxford: Macmillan 2010).

No one could claim that it is an easy task to create collocations dictionaries: the chief problem is where to draw the proverbial line on a spectrum ranging from complete predictability, usually on a left-to-right basis, to total volatility of association by mere juxtaposition, for example, corned beef v. cheap beef .