pastiche
Americannoun
-
a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.
-
an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge.
noun
-
a work of art that mixes styles, materials, etc
-
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
Yale law professor Akhil Amar wrote in an amicus brief that the administration’s historical evidence amounts to “an artful pastiche of misleading, misinterpreted, and/or atypical shards.”
From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 29, 2026
He opted for pseudo-macho pastiche, with a distinct Reddit-ish tang: Operation Epic Fury might as well translate to Operation Epic Bacon.
From Slate • Mar. 6, 2026
As Ganz archly observed, “the word for the politics that makes a pastiche of past glories to create a new type of regime is ‘fascism.'”
From Salon • Sep. 10, 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.
