English Collocations with Success

Here you will learn useful English collocations with SUCCESS .

Also, don’t forget to check out English Expressions about Success where you will find idioms and expressions that will help you talk about your achievements and success in English.

Harry

Harry is a native English teacher with over 10 years of experience both online and in face-to-face lessons. With his extensive experience in business, he specialises in Business English lessons but happily teaches ESL students with any English learning needs.

This is Harry and welcome back to my podcast Speak Better English with Harry where I try to help you understand and make better use of your English.

I’ve got a lot of words that we can use to collocate with SUCCESS. So let me give them to you and explain in a couple of examples how to use them.

Intermediate to Advanced English Marathon

INSANITY: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

What you'll learn:
better understanding of more complex grammar structures
advanced English vocabulary words
British & American slang
perfect your listening skills through practing different accents

This marathon is for you if you're:
stuck at an intermediate English level
tired of confusing explanations
a mature student
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The first is TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS.

Well, of course, we all like to achieve success in whatever we do. We don’t always reach that particular goal, but we like to try to achieve success.

And we achieve success because of our own endeavours, because of the effort and work we put it into it.

Or we can say we achieve success thanks to the support of our family, thanks to the support of our colleagues, thanks to the support of some benefactor, some supporters who have either given you financial support, or something else.

A sports star, who’s starting off in his career as a golfer or a tennis player, will often need the support of a sponsor to get invitations to certain events, and then after some success at a lower level he rises and rises in the ranks of the tennis ranks and eventually wins some very significant competition.

And he then can say that his success or the success that he achieved is due to the support of his many many sponsors. To achieve success.

DON'T SAY Don’t say MAKE success or MAKE a success.
Say HAVE success or ACHIEVE success.

English Collocations with Success

We can DESERVE SUCCESS.

So when we deserve success it usually means that we spend many years, or in some cases decades, trying to achieve something.

A scientist trying to unravel the intricacies of some disease, for example cancer research, eventually toasts the success of his breakthrough drug that is going to mean an end to extensive chemotherapy for some people. So everybody around the world will say:

He deserves the success because he had spent many years researching, he had spent many days and nights trying to find that little breakthrough that will make the difference for thousands, perhaps millions, of people around the world and into the future.

He deserves success.

Or he deserves his success.

Or the success is well deserved.

So you can use in many ways, the meaning is exactly the same. He deserves success, he deserves that success.

English Collocations with Success

We can ENJOY SUCCESS.

Of course, we can. When we achieve something, when we get to our goal, when we get to whatever we want to do. Whether it’s the end of that marathon or it’s that polar expedition, whatever it is, something even less important than that, we enjoy our success.

So we enjoy our success because we know what we have done, what we have sacrificed to get where we are today. So people might often say

Enjoy the success while it lasts.

And often success can be short-lived, meaning it doesn’t last for a long time.

So we enjoy our success, and somebody might say: “Yes, while it lasts.” Today we are euphoric, and everybody’s congratulating us, in a weeks time people will have forgotten, so we become yesterday’s news.

So enjoy success while it lasts, or just simply enjoy success, enjoy what you’ve done, enjoy what you have achieved.

English Collocations with Success

And then, finally, a much more formal last expression MEET WITH SUCCESS.

His ideas or plans met with success.

Meaning everybody else agreed that it was a good idea, good suggestion, and that’s how we should take this forward.

So his plans for the redevelopment of the city centre were met with success. So the local council or the major, or the local government, whoever it is that has to give the final approval to the plans, liked what they saw, they liked the future, the pictures, the way the city was going to develop, so his plans were met with success.

So this is sometimes about hope and aspiration. Our hopes are that people will like it, and our aspirations are our beliefs that we will one day live to see the fruits of our labour. It’s quite a formal expression – meet with success.

Everything we do, we hope, meets with success. Whether it’s a business course, it’s a university course, it’s some other plans that we can implement, and we hope that they can meet with success.

Okay, so there are the collocations with success: