TOEIC Collocations: The Verb + Noun Pairs Behind One Question in Six

What is a collocation on the TOEIC?

A pair of words that native speakers habitually use together — meet a deadline, submit a report, address a concern. On the TOEIC it matters because verb choice is the most-tested skill in the whole bank: 2,597 of the 16,214 questions eng-test.com analysed, or 16.0%. One question in six turns on which verb belongs with which noun.

That 2,597 splits into 1,529 items labelled business vocabulary: verb choice and 1,068 labelled vocabulary: verb choice. No other single skill comes close — the next largest is reading for specific detail at 1,142.

The tested unit is the pair, never the word. A question giving you improve, enhance, increase and raise is not asking which word you know — all four are common. It is asking which one goes with the noun that follows the blank.

Which verbs are tested most often?

Twenty verbs carry most of the load. These are the verbs most often correct across the 2,597 verb-choice questions, with the plain-English word each one replaces and the nouns it actually takes.

enhance leads at 113, nearly twice the next verb. That is worth knowing on its own: when a TOEIC blank is followed by an abstract improvement noun — satisfaction, awareness, efficiency, capability — enhance is statistically the most likely answer in this bank.

Which exact collocations appear most?

These twenty pairs are the ones that recur most often across the analysed verb-choice questions. Learn them as single units and a measurable slice of Part 5 becomes automatic.

Two patterns are worth noticing. First, the objects are abstract business nouns, not technical terms — operations, deadline, attendance, efficiency, market share. Second, several verbs are near-synonyms that are not interchangeable: you relocate operations but curtail operations, and you enhance brand awareness but boost brand awareness — both of those last two are attested, which is why the exam pairs them with a third verb that is not.

Which verbs need a preposition?

Eight of the most-tested verbs are useless without the right preposition, and the TOEIC exploits that constantly. Getting the verb right and the preposition wrong still loses the mark, and the preposition is usually already printed in the sentence — which makes it the answer key.

When a Part 5 item offers adhere, comply, abide and conform together, read the preposition before you read the options. “_____ by the rules” can only be abide; “_____ with the rules” can only be comply. This single habit clears a whole family of items, and Part 5 question types and tactics covers the other families.

Write every verb on your list with its preposition welded on: not “adhere” but “adhere to”, not “comply” but “comply with”. A verb learned without its preposition is a verb you will get wrong under time pressure.

Why do collocations beat single-word vocabulary lists?

Because the distractors are chosen to defeat single-word knowledge. In a verb-choice item all four options usually share a meaning; what separates them is which noun they take. A learner who memorised four definitions has no way to choose, while a learner who memorised four pairs answers instantly.

The context data makes the same point from another direction. HR is the most common business context at 2,830 questions, and its densest items are pairs — the 38 words that carry the HR context are nearly all listed with the noun they travel with. Finance is the hardest context at 39.9% hard, and the reason is formal verbs standing in for plain ones, which is again a pairing problem rather than a definition problem.

This is also why storing words in context outperforms flashcard definitions — the techniques that make vocabulary stick set out how to record a pair so it survives to exam day, and the 100 most frequent words across the whole bank are worth converting into pairs the same way.

How should you drill TOEIC collocations?

In pairs, out loud, and inside timed questions. A verb-choice item carries an estimated 37.1 seconds if it is a vocabulary item and 45.4 if it is an incomplete-sentence item, so the target is recognition without deliberation — which only comes from repetition of the pair, not the word.

1. 1Start with the eight preposition verbs. They are the most commonly confused group and the cheapest to fix.
2. 2Add the top ten verbs by count — enhance, relocate, improve, devise, expand, submit, foster, extend, scrutinize, streamline. Between them they are over 500 correct answers.
3. 3Say the whole pair aloud when you review: “extend the deadline”, not “extend = ขยาย”. The sound of the pair is what you will recognise in the exam.
4. 4Cover the noun and try to produce the verb, then cover the verb and produce the noun. Both directions get tested.
5. 5Drill inside complete items — eight worked TOEIC-style Reading questions with explanations show the format, and the free 5-question sample gives you fresh ones each session.

How reliable are these collocation counts?

Three limits. First, these count eng-test.com’s own bank, not official ETS papers, which are not public. The pairs describe what a faithful model of the exam tests. Second, the collocation counts are extracted programmatically from the words following each blank, so a pair such as “postpone until next …” is recorded as the sentence phrases it rather than as a dictionary headword.

Third, the 2,597 figure covers the two skill labels the bank uses for verb choice. A wider family of labels that also mention verb choice reaches 3,165, so 16.0% is the conservative reading, not the maximum.

The figures come from a 16,214-question snapshot of the active Reading pool inside eng-test.com’s bank of 20,000+ original items, taken on 10 July 2026 and re-counted on 26 September 2026. eng-test.com is an independent practice site and is not affiliated with ETS or the official TOEIC test. Full methodology is in our analysis of 16,214 TOEIC Reading questions.