collage

American  

[kuh-lahzh, koh-] / kəˈlɑʒ, koʊ- /

noun

• collages
  plural

1. a technique of composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another, as newspaper clippings, parts of photographs, theater tickets, and fragments of an envelope.

2. a work of art produced by this technique.

3. an assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition.

   The experimental play is a collage of sudden scene shifts, long monologues, musical interludes, and slapstick.

4. a film that presents a series of seemingly unrelated scenes or images or shifts from one scene or image to another suddenly and without transition.

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verb (used with object)

collaged, collaging

1. to make a collage of.

   The artist has collaged old photos, cartoon figures, and telephone numbers into a unique work of art.

collage British  

/ kəˈlɑːʒ, kɔlaʒ, kɒ- /

noun

1. an art form in which compositions are made out of pieces of paper, cloth, photographs, and other miscellaneous objects, juxtaposed and pasted on a dry ground

2. a composition made in this way

3. any work, such as a piece of music, created by combining unrelated styles

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• collagist
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• collages
  plural

Etymology

Origin of collage

1915–20; < French, equivalent to colle paste, glue (< Greek kólla ) + -age -age

Explanation

Have you ever cut out a bunch of pictures from magazines and pasted them together to make a big picture? If you have, you have made a collage. Collage came to English through French from the Greek word for glue, kolla, about 100 years ago. A collage is not only made from magazine pictures. In the world of fine art, it refers to a work made with various small objects sometimes with paint sometimes without. The word can also be used to mean a collection of different things. If it's very loud in your house, you might come home to a collage of sounds from the dog, the TV, your mom on the phone and your brother on the guitar. Years after you graduate, high school might just seem like a collage of memories.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

collage collages collaged collaging

Her arms today are as colorful as Ruby’s notebooks: a collage of her favorite animals and objects, reproductions of her drawings, flowers in the shape of her handprint.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 26, 2026

Saar’s dear friend, artist and jeweler Neil Lane, recalls how she taught him to collage: slowly layering papers with matte medium and, of course, saving every scrap.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 15, 2026

Mr. Moore, who has created acclaimed comic books and fiction, draws on all his talents in crafting this lurid collage of English culture past, present and future.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 9, 2026

In the 1980s Hockney invented a kind of photo collage he dubbed "joiners" that used slightly different images to produce a patchwork akin to the cubist painting of his hero Pablo Picasso.

From Barron's ● Jun. 12, 2026

It was a collage of shredded roof tiles surrounding a red heart covered in barbed wire.

From "Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World" by Ashley Herring Blake

Through the 1970s and early 80s, her work depicted uncharacteristically dark series' of collages in which she embraced the imagery of natural life cycles.

From BBC ● Aug. 27, 2026

In the ’80s came his extraordinary multi-image photographic collages of friends including writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy and such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Canyon and Pearblossom Highway.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 12, 2026

Why not make big printouts of the digital collages and call it a day?

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 16, 2026

Man Ray also built ingenious collages, bas-relief constructions and elegant chess sets.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 27, 2025

The bulletin boards were like huge paper time warps—shaggy, colorful collages.

From "The Landry News" by Andrew Clements

A collaged print by Liu Shiyuan presents a dizzying array of images—fruit, bees, jellyfish, shrouded figures, fabric samples—that is more disorienting than anything else.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026

But GenAI can do more than create collaged images and help write emails -- it can also design new drugs to treat disease.

From Science Daily ● Feb. 7, 2024

“Armstrong archives and recontextualizes his public life by hand, to be layered and collaged onto the walls of his private life,” she said.

From New York Times ● Aug. 3, 2023

At the diagonally opposite corner of the country, romantic notions of woodland collaged with vibrant crimson on crisp-autumn mornings are unlike almost anywhere else on earth.

From Salon ● Jun. 18, 2023

I continue to turn the pages of my mother's beauty book, devouring everything: ink drawings, rouge-stick color smudges, flower petals, and collaged petit-paintings; beauty pamphlets, spintria prices, diagrams of women's bodies.

From "The Belles" by Dhonielle Clayton

His collaging instincts are still present, but here his visions are laced with a mystery that draws us in.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 7, 2026

Certainly, if you're at home collaging a vision board for fun with your friends, that sounds like a blast.

From Salon ● Apr. 9, 2024

Victoria Lopez, 20, describes the collaging meetups as feeling like a balm for “the collective trauma and grief that’s been held over us these last three years.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 5, 2023

Javadi incorporates similar techniques, collaging swaths of colorfully patterned fabric with black-and-white archival images of elegantly dressed, bareheaded women.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 24, 2022

You’re not collaging together your creativity on the road with little fragments — I’ve been able to work with a greater sense of singularity.

From New York Times ● May 17, 2022