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

The digital collage gives way to a more familiar cooking-show fantasy.

From Salon ● Aug. 5, 2026

The groundbreaking photographer and multimedia artist created a metallic blue photo collage celebrating jazz.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 16, 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

The massive collage occupies both sides of the concourse at Wilshire/La Brea and plays with time, place and light.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 8, 2026

In our hurried, twenty-first-century way of life, we find the idea of musical collage - the mix, the remix, the iPod shuffle and the mash-up - familiar and unthreatening.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall

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 1970s, he became intrigued by the Polaroid camera, making hundreds of collages which played with space and perspective.

From BBC ● 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

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 16, 2026

All my crafts, from the large-scale collages hanging on the walls to the decorated toilet paper dispenser, were what Nan called “pack-worthy.”

From "Hope Springs" by Jaime Berry

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

Questions of what people own, and control are increasingly supplanted by questions of who or what people are, replacing clashes of classes with the collaging of identities and morals.

From Salon ● Sep. 12, 2024

More supper clubs have emerged, while slow burns like magazine collaging are a hit.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 25, 2024

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