Word association is one of the ways by which we construct new sentences - based upon associations which we have learned over a long time. Now that computers are being used to publish everything from newspaper to books, they can be used to find word associations in some body of text - whether a book, the works of one author or just newspapers.

Chris Tibble, who has been teaching English language for many years, writes a short article in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly in the "Learning English" section which appears once a month. These are an excellent resource, not only for content but for the relatively light-hearted manner in which they have been written.

Chris Tribble's web-site contains lots more useful teaching material too!

The index presented below will, therefore grow over time as months go by, including more and more groups of associations discovered in the corpus (collection of articles forming the body of an association data base) of words which has been published in the Guardian Weekly since they started collecting their article to form this corpus.

• A house is seldom a home - there is a big difference.
• A very bankable bad news word - words associated with money!.
• Beginnings of the end - and in the beginning.
• Counting the cost of numbers - and the words used with them!
• Don't hold your breath - and drinking, sleeping and breathing.
• Don't look back - at the previous years words and their associations.
• Forwards and backwards in time - the future and the past.
• The good, the bad and the inappropriate - good, bad associations and a look at the way inappropriate has changed.
• Getting what we want ... or need?
• Hard times for soft fruits - using berry as a suffix!
• Inescapable sex and death - the two things ever with us.
• Making heavy weather - the surprising number of non-meteorological terms associated with weather words.
• Money's too tight to mention - a look at price, debt and taxes!
• Not like the ones we used to know - white Christmasses, that is.
• Play the game - terms associated with sports of all kinds.
• Pop go the onomatopoeias - a light-hearted look at "breakfast-cereal" kinds of words.
• Putting technology to the crash test - computers, trains, planes - and more.
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats - all about the business acronym "SWOT"!
• Various shades of Brown - well English Prime Ministers really!
• What a difference a day makes - sunny - or otherwise - parts of a day.
• What was what, who is who? - a look to see some of the things that have changed most over the years
• What we can learn from revolting students - terms involving schools and students.
• Numbers that we count on - terms associated with numbers both small and large.

The order of the above index is not related to the age of the article, rather is it related to the alphabetical order of the word (or words) which form its title.