Question

what is difference between collocation and compound words?

Answer 1

COLLOCATIONS

Collocations are words that are generally used together. 
For example,

commit a crimemake a mistakedistant memorybreak a recordbunch of flowersfast food

It would sound strange if you said ’make a crime’, ’do a mistake’, ’remote memory’, ’knock a record’, ’pack of flowers’ or ’quick food’. These words don’t collocate with each other (don’t sound correct together)

COMPOUND WORDS

People begin to recognize and understand simple compound words, such as airplane and toothbrush, in first grade, then progress to more complex compound words. After sometime we also begin to notice that there are many compound word families that use the same base word, such as house (doghouse, birdhouse, farmhouse).

There are three different types of compound words:

Closed form: Two words are joined together to create a new meaning (firefly, softball, redhead, keyboard, makeup, notebook).Hyphenated form: Words are joined together by a hyphen (daughter-in-law, over-the-counter, six-year-old).Open form: Words are open but when read together, a new meaning is formed (post office, real estate, full moon).

Studying compound words offers a great opportunity to engage students in understanding the English language. It builds an interest in words and prepares them to learn prefixes, suffixes, and word roots.

I hope this clears your doubt☺

Answer 2

Collocation- The pro collocation refers to a group of two or more words the usually go together. A good way to think of collocation is to look at the word collocation.

Compound words- A compound word is a combination of two or more words that function as a single unit of meaning.