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

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Etymology

Origin of collage

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

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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

As part of their final artwork project, students in St Patrick's Keady worked with an artist on a large mix media collage that included a tree representing growth and a heart representing support.

From BBC ● Oct. 8, 2026

It offers a somewhat surreal vision of the Western U.S. and the many contradictions it contains—fame and loneliness, rural and urban, traditional and contemporary—in a sumptuous if disjointed collage.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 14, 2026

She arranges four painted notebook covers together on her lap, forming a collage.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 15, 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

Beneath this was a collection of yellow newspaper cuttings, all stuck together to make a ragged collage.

From "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling

Ever since he began snapping Polaroids in the 1960s, Hockney maintained an intense relationship with photography, taking thousands of pictures and using some in collages and other works.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 2026

Portraits, politically charged tabletop collages and quiet photographs that capture the simple vibrance of daily life are strewn across Regen’s 20,000 square feet of gallery space.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 17, 2026

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

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 27, 2025

In his later years he became bed bound and focused on creating cut paper collages.

From BBC ● Nov. 28, 2025

We use the same-color paper for our collages.

From "Muffled" by Jennifer Gennari

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

We collaged and put in our own boxes as care packages.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 19, 2025

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

Their floors were always collaged with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops.

From "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris

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

But taking all these layers, collaging it, and then something new rises up above it that is informed by all these layers.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 15, 2022

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

So I was painting on the walls, I was collaging.

From New York Times ● Jun. 8, 2022

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