collage

/kəˈlɑʒ/

/ˈkɒlɑʒ/

Other forms: collages

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.

Definitions of collage

1. noun

   a paste-up made by sticking together pieces of paper or photographs to form an artistic image
   “he used his computer to make a collage of pictures superimposed on a map”

   synonyms: montage

   types:

   photomontage

   a montage that uses photographic images

   type of:

   paste-up

   a composition of flat objects pasted on a board or other backing

   icon, ikon, image, picture

   a visual representation (of an object or scene or person or abstraction) produced on a surface
2. noun

   any collection of diverse things
   “a collage of memories”

   type of:

   accumulation, aggregation, assemblage, collection

   several things grouped together or considered as a whole