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

I love the art of collage — stealing from different artists, but doing it my way.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 29, 2026

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

I slow down to stare at the collage.

From "I Can Make This Promise" by Christine Day

Ever since he began snapping Polaroids in the 1960s, Hockney maintained an intense relationship with photography, taking thousands of pictures and using some in collages and other works.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 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

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 16, 2026

Among the nearly 100 works on view are sculptures in iron, wood, alabaster and clay as well as drawings, collages and experimental works using paper.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 13, 2025

Ana's collages had been shown by famous galleries in San Francisco and New York and Mexico City for years, but in the last few months she'd sold work to three different museums.

From "We Are Okay" by Nina LaCour

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

A collaged flier for the meeting showed a skeleton hand clutching a butterfly above a succinct description written in gothic font: “A group discussion of death with no agenda, objectives or themes.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 12, 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

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

It’s where scrapbooking, collaging and journaling come together.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 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

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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