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

This deluge of uplift is a collage of the photographer’s lifework, but he also adds: “I had Peter’s music to work from — and his music didn’t suggest darkness.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 3, 2026

It's being created in real time - as soon as the portraits are taken they appear on the wall, in a collage - something Endless says can be a creative risk.

From BBC ● Oct. 20, 2026

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

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

Brittle, brightly colored leaves arranged in a forest-floor collage: This is a book.

From "The Reader" by Traci Chee

And there was his fine art, which has generally taken the form of sculptural photographic collages that he creates out of pictures he makes.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026

In response, he created a series of photographic collages that showed Black boxers battling corporate towers — figures that generate wealth attempting to take down the symbols of its accumulation.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026

The Readymade—the found object transformed into art—has its roots in the Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist collages, which incorporated scraps of newspaper, textiles, sheet music and wall paper.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 30, 2026

Using AI to generate images, Mr. Park collages these pictures together, then runs the result through CRT TVs, replicating the flickering, eerie results in photorealistic canvases.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 27, 2026

We taught the children how to make pot holders out of yarn and how to glue rice, glitter, and tinsel to paper plates to make collages for their folks.

From "While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement" by Carolyn Maull McKinstry

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

Yet a gilded opera theater still seems an unlikely home for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and old text and music, often with sharply contrasting styles.

From New York Times ● May 28, 2024

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

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

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

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

In the 1990s, she developed a collaging technique whereby she paints on a transparent sheet of plastic that she then sticks to the canvas and peels off, imprinting the design on canvas.

From New York Times ● Sep. 16, 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

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