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.

---

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

---

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

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

In the center of this collage is a giant, stern-faced Chávez.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 19, 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

Mr. Carlon told us to work on a collage today.

From "P.S. I Miss You" by Jen Petro-Roy

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

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

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

When we visited earlier this month, some of the residents were sitting round a table in the dining area, making brightly coloured collages of flower baskets.

From BBC ● Jun. 29, 2025

“We need to get cracking on our collages today since I want to finish this project before Thanksgiving.”

From "Shooting Kabul" by N. H. Senzai

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

Many of the artists you cover are grappling with war, from Woolf to Schneemann, who created work about Vietnam, and Martha Rosler, who collaged magazine spreads together with war photos.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 21, 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

Junk journaling is essentially a craft practice that combines elements of collaging, journaling and scrapbooking.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 23, 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

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