Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use collective in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Collective means formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body. Example: “Collective salvation is not possible without personal salvation, but the latter is achievable.”

Examples of collective by meaning

adjectiveFormed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body.

  • the collective body of a nation

nounA group dedicated to a particular cause or interest.

  • There are, however, a number of contemporary artists and art collectives that have defined their practice precisely around the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities.2005, Zoya Kocur, Simon Leung, Theory in contemporary art since 1985, page 76
  • Critical Art Ensemble is one of many art collectives operating on the principle that information is power and that it is most effectively made available through a combination of science and aesthetics.2006 March 5, Holland Cotter, “The Collective Conscious”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  • Today’s collectives create together, tour together, exhibit together, live together, survive together, eat together, sleep together, march together, fight together and party together, too.2021 October 13, Adam Bradley, “The Creative Collectives Finding Strength in Numbers”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

nounThe flight control used to control a helicopter's ascent or descent.

  • A pilot normally holds the collective stationary until the helicopter stops; however, to get more braking action, lower the collective slightly.2012, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Helicopter Flying Handbook: FAA-H-8083-21A, Ravenio Books
  • Hover height, rate of ascent, and the rate of descent are controlled by using the collective.2021 July 27, Federal Aviation Administration, Helicopter Flying Handbook: FAA-H-8083-21B, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN

More sentences with collective

  • Collective salvation is not possible without personal salvation, but the latter is achievable.From the entry salvation
  • The dramatical interpretation of the book caught the viewers' collective imagination.From the entry dramatical
  • They ruthlessly suppressed any dissent for fear that it would inspire the citizens to take some sort of collective action against the government.From the entry collective action
  • Mushroomcore taps into our collective craving for nature, nostalgia and a bit of eccentric charm.2025 July 14, Unattributed, “Fashionable fungi: How to get the mushroomcore look in your home”, in Good Homes Magazine, archived from the…. From the entry mushroomcore
  • They recognise that a strong Chelsea is important for the collective brand.March 11 2022, David Hytner, “Chelsea are in crisis but there is no will to leave club on their knees”, in The Guardian. From the entry loth
  • Together those servers, and other, non-Mastodon ones, form a collective of interlinked communities dubbed the “Fediverse.”2022 November 14, Will Knight, “The Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment”, in Wired, →ISSN. From the entry fediverse
  • We're in a collective flop era and there's a gorgeous sense of community in that.2021, Maddy Black, "Unearthing Your Truth: Astrology Edition", Greater Expectations (University College London), Spring 2021, page 14. From the entry flop era
  • Ins is a collective noun signifying humans, recognisable familiar human beings.2020, Abu-Hamdiyyah, Muhammad, The Qur'an: an introduction, Routledge, page 101. From the entry jinn
  • They were her squad, and their collective energy was squad goals.2019 July 18, Arit John, “A Brief History of Squads”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC…. From the entry goals
  • The individual level of perceiving and dealing with threats interacts with the collective level of the traumascape.2018, Dinesh Bhugra, Kamaldeep Bhui, Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry, page 382. From the entry traumascape
  • Competing multiquasiparticle configurations are found to contribute to a rich variety of collective phenomena in this nucleus..2016, A. D. Ayangeakaa, U. Garg, C. M. Petrache, S. Guo, P. W. Zhao, J. T. Matta, B. K. Nayak, D. Patel, R. V. F. Janssens, M. P.…. From the entry multiquasiparticle
  • Each collective was steered by an individual or a few prominent memberes.2015, Tessa G. Diphoorn, Twilight Policing: Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa, →ISBN. From the entry road captain
  • Such materials possess deeply subdiffractional, highly directional collective modes: hyperbolic phonon-polaritons.2015, Jhih-Sheng Wu, D. N. Basov, M. M. Fogler, “Topological insulators are tunable waveguides for hyperbolic polaritons”, in arXiv. From the entry subdiffractional
  • A collective note was sent to Germany on the interpretation of Article 16.2015, Willard N. Hogan, International Conflict and Collective Security, →ISBN, page 65. From the entry collective note
  • How then is the collective capital of knowledge, practices and values distributed in medicine.2015, Alan Bleakley, Medical Humanities and Medical Education, →ISBN. From the entry countercapital
  • Rather, they would become instruments, one type among many, for the realisation of collective goals.2015, Richard Scase, Industrial Society, page 52. From the entry purveyable
  • Sociality swung wildly between extremes of collective affiliation and agonistic striving for dominance.2014, Lucas Bessire, Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life, The University of Chicago Press, Introduction, p. 8. From the entry agonistic
  • Unlike graphene, 3DTDS allows electrons to be assembled in a collective to flow in all directions.2014 February 10, Lucas Mearian, “Graphene-like 3D Material May Advance Storage”, in Computerworld, volume 48, number 2, Framingham…. From the entry 3DTDS
  • The discourse of Europeanity is one that combines 'we' with a collective political identity beyond the state.2014, R. Coman, T. Kostera, L. Tomini, Europeanization and European Integration. From the entry Europeanity
  • Supreme Court to protect Sto:lo people's collective rights and title in the 5-Mile Fishery.2013 June 20, Jennifer Feinberg, “Sto:lo head to B.C. Supreme court over Yale Treaty”, in The Chilliwack Progress. From the entry Sto:lo
  • He followed me to my first collective meeting, so he's one step up from a wienie wagger.2011, James Ellroy, Hollywood Nocturnes, →ISBN. From the entry wienie wagger
  • Lasker was the center of this collective, its nucleating force, its queen bee.2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, Fourth Estate (2011), page 113. From the entry nucleate
  • The new xenophobia is thus a collective psychological response to peregrinity.2010, Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights, page 134. From the entry peregrinity
  • The Bech books constitute a wryly caricaturish collective profile of Mr.2009 January 28, Bruce Weber, “Updike’s Stories: Some Paths Traveled, Some Not Taken”, in New York Times. From the entry caricaturish
  • British English tends more than American English to have plural agreement with collective nouns.2008, Ron Cowan, The Teacher's Grammar of English with Answers. From the entry collective noun
  • The term vranyo in Russian describes the subtle collective participation people can have in deception.2007, David Shulman, From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace, →ISBN, page 79. From the entry vranyo
  • Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true.2006 May 29, Jaron Lanier, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism”, in Edge. From the entry hivemind
  • Taken together, these websites resembled something of a first-person news network, a collective form of collaborative news-gathering.2006, Stuart Allan, Online News: Journalism And The Internet, page 61. From the entry newsy
  • Collective daydreaming shut down when we boarded the Soviet-made airliner in Korea.2005, Paul Carter, Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, page 165. From the entry Mother Russia
  • In Tokkuzak town of Kashgar, over hundred students and teachers were arrested for performing collective prayer.2005 July 20, Rebiya Kadeer, “Letter from Rebiya Kadeer, Human Rights Activist, to the Congress of the United States”, in Falun Gong and…. From the entry Tokkuzak
  • The definition of primary importance is of course the definition of "collective investment scheme" itself.2003, Jonathan Fisher, Jane Bewsey, The Law of Investor Protection. From the entry collective investment scheme
  • Eskista is the dance of the Amharas, enhancing amorous repartee and expressing collective jubilation.2002 August 1, Frank Tenaille, Music is the Weapon of the Future: Fifty Years of African Popular Music, →ISBN, page 168. From the entry Ethiopian
  • Or is it more important for a society to concentrate on collective memory?2001 October 27, Sarah Boxer, “A Memorial Is Itself A Shaper Of Memory”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry collective memory
  • The population is proudly celebrating their collective "coming out," and business is booming.1999, “Shanghai”, in The Book of the World, 2nd United States edition (Atlas), Macmillan, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 411, column 1. From the entry come out

Meaning of collective

  1. adjective Formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body.
  2. adjective Tending to collect; forming a collection.
  3. adjective Having plurality of origin or authority.

Full definition of collective

Questions about collective in a sentence

How do you use collective in a sentence?
Collective is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Collective salvation is not possible without personal salvation, but the latter is achievable.”
What is a short sentence with collective?
“the collective body of a nation”
What does collective mean?
Collective means formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: collective (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use collective in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/collective. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.