montage means A composite work, particularly an artwork, created by assembling or putting together other elements such as pieces of music, pictures, texts, videos, etc. It carries an Arena rating of 1469, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, montage ranks #441 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #1,362 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #2,377 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #2,598 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words.
montage is pronounced /mɒnˈtɑːʒ/.
Why “montage” is a great word
A composite work created by assembling diverse images, clips, or sounds into a new whole to convey an idea or compress narrative time. From French montage (“assembly, set-up”), from monter (“to mount, assemble, go up”), from Late Latin montāre (“to mount, go up”), from Latin mōns (“mountain”). Unlike “collage,” which glues paper and fabric to a static surface, or the general craft of “editing,” which selects and arranges, montage is a kinetic philosophy of juxtaposition—a meaning forged from clash and sequence. It is the feverish rush of a life told in sixty seconds of birthdays and funerals, the violent poetry of a machine gun intercut with a slaughterhouse, and the slow accretion of a city’s skyline from a thousand disparate shots. To build, to climb, to stack image upon image until meaning emerges not from any single frame but from the spark of their collision.
Etymology
, La matière denaturalisée. Destruction 2. (Denatured Matter. Destruction 2.; c. 1923), from the collection of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, Friesland, Netherlands. The work is a collage, a type of montage.]] Unadapted borrowing from French montage (“assembly, set-up”).
noun
- A composite work, particularly an artwork, created by assembling or putting together other elements such as pieces of music, pictures, texts, videos, etc.e.g.“Near-synonyms: collage, bricolage”
- The art or process of doing this.e.g.“Near-synonyms: collage, bricolage”
- A sequence of brief clips, often set to music, used to compress a long event or series of events into a short scene.e.g.“THE MYTH: Training montages are inspiring, harmless fun. At some point in any sports movie, the grossly unqualified underdog will start training to the sound of some inspirational rock song.” — 2013 October 29, Cracked.com, The De-Textbook: The Stuff You Didn't Know About the Stuff You Thought You Knew, Penguin, →ISBN, page 177:
verb
- To combine into, or depict as, a montage.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- photomontage 77% match — A composite image combining two or more photographs. vs montage →
- montagist 69% match — A person who makes montages. vs montage →
- automontage 62% match — An automated montage of images vs montage →
- supercut 62% match — A montage of short video clips, usually from a film or TV series, illustrating a particular repeated element such as a word or phrase. vs montage →
- collage 61% match — A picture made by sticking other pictures onto a surface or juxtaposing them digitally in analogous manner. vs montage →
- femmage 58% match — Any artwork created by women by assembling objects, as by collage, photomontage, etc. vs montage →
- assemblage 55% match — The process of assembling or bringing together. vs montage →
- mashup 55% match — Something consisting of two or more elements combined together.; An artistic work that consists primarily of parts borrowed from other works, or features a mixture of genres. vs montage →