Montage

How to spell montage

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce montage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does montage mean?

1. nounA composite assembled from separate pieces, especially a film sequence of short shots edited together or an artwork made of combined images.

Montage in a sentence

• The documentary opened with a fast montage of city traffic and crowded stations.

• She pinned a montage of holiday photographs to the corkboard above her desk.

Where does montage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes straight from French, where montage means 'a mounting' or 'an assembling', built on the verb monter, 'to mount or put together'. That verb traces back through Old French to the Latin mons, meaning 'mountain', via the idea of going up or raising something into place. The -age ending is a French noun suffix that turns an action into a thing, so montage literally describes the act of assembling parts into a whole. English adopted it in the early twentieth century as cinema developed, when editors began splicing separate strips of film into a single flowing sequence, and the term broadened to cover any composite of images or sounds. Because the word kept its French shape, the soft -tage ending sounds like 'tahzh', which is exactly the spelling trap: the ending is -tage, not -tag or -taj.

How the word is built

• mont (from French monter: to mount, assemble)
• -age (noun suffix denoting an action or its result)