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

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

From Salon ● Aug. 5, 2026

The deceptively simple work is part sculpture, part assemblage, part collage and features a vintage wooden ironing board set beside a white sheet hung on a line with six wooden clothespins.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2026

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 15, 2026

Reich was fascinated by the creative possibilities of splicing up tape recordings and putting them back together again in collage or repetitive sequence, inspiring, among others, The Beatles to do likewise.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall

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

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

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

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

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

Martin’s colorful mural, “Hey Young World,” combines photorealistic imagery and graffiti text collaged together.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 15, 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

Junk journaling, yet another marker of younger generations’ continued reversion to physical media, is a catch-all term for a craft practice that incorporates scrapbooking, collaging and journaling.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2025

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

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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