From the geology course I took in 1975: Minerals are naturally occurring crystals of compound. Snow is a mineral, but volcanic glass is not. Rocks are amalgams of minerals and non-minerals.
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation, as propounded by Michael Halliday, is the expression strong tea.
B2 [ C ] also collocate, a word or phrase that is often used with another word or phrase, in a way that sounds correct to people who have spoken the language all their lives, but might not be expected from the meaning: 1  In the phrase a hard frost, hard is a collocation of frost and strong would not sound natural. B2 [ C ] the combination of words formed when two or more words are often used together in a way that sounds correct: The phrase a hard frost is a collocation.