pastiche
Americannoun
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a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.
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an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge.
noun
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a work of art that mixes styles, materials, etc
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a work of art that imitates the style of another artist or period
Etymology
Origin of pastiche
1700–10; < French < Italian pasticcio pasticcio
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
At a sturdy 100-minute runtime, “Hag” blows past pastiche at every turn, doing laps around the thriller genre’s conventions and tropes.
From Salon • Apr. 5, 2026
The postwar period is rife with big names who used brands as both a pastiche of and paean to America’s consumer culture: Richard Prince, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Eduardo Paolozzi and—king of them all—Andy Warhol.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 3, 2026
Both foes imagine a self-consciously cinematic scene, something audiences themselves assumed Tarantino would then deliver with gusto exactly as they described — isn’t that the hipster pastiche he’s after?
From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 5, 2025
The building is a matte-black pyramid, fitted with 4,407 rooms and 65,000 square feet of gaming space, all flourished with pop-Egyptian pastiche.
From Slate • Nov. 18, 2025
The last of these quotations is a pastiche, but the other two are real, and all are typical of the inward-looking style that makes academic writing so tedious.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
