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

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

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

He liked comic books, Pop art, collage, landscape, the miniature worlds of Joseph Cornell boxes: virtually anything modest and surprising, even self-effacing.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 24, 2026

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

From Salon ● Aug. 5, 2026

Pua’s collage earns an honorable mention, as does Nalu’s drawing of Narnia.

From "Clairboyance" by Kristiana Kahakauwila

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

Krasner’s muscular collages incorporating charcoal drawings made at Hofmann’s school provide a vigorous finale, with the small elements in the abstracted figures enriching the scale.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 3, 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

It’s like making a collage from magazine clippings—the only difference is that the collages are digital and easily shared with anyone, even strangers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 20, 2026

“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

After photographing her favorite pavers multiple times, Connor collaged the mostly 36-inch-by-36-inch squares digitally to form a fictive map of downtown.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 19, 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

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

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

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

Random Word

Spin the wheel and learn a new word!

---