Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Assembled into or viewed as a whole.
  • adjective Of, relating to, characteristic of, or made by a number of people acting as a group.
  • noun An undertaking, such as a business operation, set up on the principles or system of collectivism.
  • noun A collective noun.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Belonging to, vested in, or exercised by a number of individuals jointly, or considered as forming one body; united; aggregated: opposed to individual and distributive: as, collective actions.
  • In grammar, denoting an aggregate, group, or assemblage; expressing under the singular form a whole consisting of a plurality of individual objects or persons: as, a collective noun.
  • Deducing consequences; reasoning; inferring.
  • Having the quality or power of collecting together; tending to collect; forming a collection.
  • Relating to or of the nature of collectivism; belonging to the people as a whole.
  • noun In grammar, a noun in the singular number signifying an aggregate or assemblage, as multitude, crowd, troop, herd, people, society, Clergy, meeting, etc.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Gram.) A collective noun or name.
  • adjective Formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body; congregated or aggregated.
  • adjective obsolete Deducing consequences; reasoning; inferring.
  • adjective (Gram.) Expressing a collection or aggregate of individuals, by a singular form
  • adjective Tending to collect; forming a collection.
  • adjective Having plurality of origin or authority.
  • adjective (Bot.) that which is formed from a mass of flowers, as the mulberry, pineapple, and the like; -- called also multiple fruit.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body; congregated or aggregated; as, the collective body of a nation.
  • adjective obsolete : Deducing consequences; reasoning; inferring.
  • adjective grammar : Expressing a collection or aggregate of individuals, by a singular form; as, a collective name or noun, like assembly, army, jury, etc.
  • adjective Tending to collect; forming a collection.
  • adjective Having plurality of origin or authority; as, in diplomacy, a note signed by the representatives of several governments is called a collective note.
  • noun A farm owned by a collection of people.
  • noun grammar A collective noun or name.
  • noun by extension A group dedicated to a particular cause or interest.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective done by or characteristic of individuals acting together
  • adjective set up on the principle of collectivism or ownership and production by the workers involved usually under the supervision of a government
  • noun members of a cooperative enterprise
  • adjective forming a whole or aggregate

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin collectivus, from collectus, past participle of colligere ("to collect"), from com- ("together") + legere ("to gather"). Compare French collectif.

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Examples

  • So to my friends who hate collective purchasing and I use the word collective to spur them to action, it is incumbent upon you to find a solution that will allow the individual consumer to have the security and access to the same level of health care that can be gotten through some form of insurance.

    Gary Puckrein: The Democratization of Health Care:The Case Against Individual Retail Transactions Gary Puckrein 2012

  • Ayers uses the word collective more often and in more ways than even Marx did.

    Deconstructing Obama Jack Cashill 2011

  • So to my friends who hate collective purchasing and I use the word collective to spur them to action, it is incumbent upon you to find a solution that will allow the individual consumer to have the security and access to the same level of health care that can be gotten through some form of insurance.

    Gary Puckrein: The Democratization of Health Care:The Case Against Individual Retail Transactions Gary Puckrein 2012

  • Ayers uses the word collective more often and in more ways than even Marx did.

    Deconstructing Obama Jack Cashill 2011

  • The term collective will be used to describe the conception of a group right as a shared or joint right, since it conceives a right-holding group as a “collection” of individuals, albeit a collection that is bound together in a way that enables them to hold their right collectively.

    Group Rights Jones, Peter 2008

  • You used the term collective consciousness religiously.

    The Real Time Search Dilemma: Consciousness Versus Memory Erick Schonfeld 2005

  • For the mass phenomenon, the large group of flowers, the tosses with the die, the molecules, we use provi - sionally the term collective (see complete definition in subsection 7, below), and we call labels, or simply results, the mutually exclusive and exhaustive proper - ties under observation.

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas HILDA GEIRINGER 1968

  • The term collective behavior, which has been used elsewhere to include all the facts of group life, has been limited for the purposes of this chapter to those phenomena which exhibit in the most obvious and elementary way the processes by which societies are disintegrated into their constituent elements and the processes by which these elements are brought together again into new relations to form new organizations and new societies.

    Introduction to the Science of Sociology Robert Ezra Park 1926

  • Individual protection covered the mask and any other protective appliance used by the individual soldier, while the term collective protection was applied to any method or appliance which afforded simultaneous protection for a number of individuals.

    The riddle of the Rhine, chemical strategy in peace and war ... 1921

  • Perhaps Lowenstein's worst subliminal cue is the phrase "collective guilt," most commonly used when discussing the crimes of Germany under the Nazis.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com RJ 2011

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