I just came across this today, and this is exactly the resource I often need. Sometimes I get an idea in my head and I know there are words to express the idea, but I just can’t make my brain tell my tongue how to move.
Today, I was wanting to say “compromise the integrity of” but I couldn’t arrive at those words. I used the computer thesaurus that is linked to Word on my computer to find a synonym for ‘weaken’ but that didn’t help. Then I tried ‘stability’ and that didn’t help either. Then I caught the notion that the phrase I was looking for was related to ‘truth’, so I looked that up. The first word in the generated list that seemed to help just a little bit was ‘uprightness’, but then I saw ‘integrity’ and I realized why I thought that ‘truth’ had something to do with the phrase I was looking for.
I knew at that point that I had half the phrase, but to my great disappointment, my brain was still not helping me come up with the first part of the phrase. So I decided to search Google for an online collocational dictionary, and it gave me this online version of the Oxford Collocational Dictionary for Students of English as the first hit…
I tried it and typed in ‘integrity’ in the search function. Wow!
It yielded collocations with ‘integrity’ organized by word class: adjectives, verbs, prepositions, and phrases. What I needed was a verb. I was quickly reminded that we can…
- have integrity
- lack integrity
- lose integrity
- restore integrity
- ensure integrity
- maintain integrity
- retain integrity
- defend integrity
- preserve integrity
- safeguard integrity
- threaten integrity (I thought, “Is this what I was looking for? No, it doesn’t quite click yet, but I know I’m getting warmer!”)
- compromise integrity (There it is!)
- impair integrity
- undermine integrity (That would have worked too!)
- destroy integrity
- question integrity
Wow, what a great resource! Now, can I get that on my local machine so I don’t have to access the Internet to get it?
ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ - you shall love 
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