Collate Meaning: Gather, Compare, Put in Order

Four senses that make up the collate meaning

1. Gather and combine information. To bring data, opinions or records from different sources into one place so they can be used together. We collated feedback from all twelve branches.
2. Arrange pages in order. To put sheets into the right sequence, especially when making several copies of a document.
3. Compare texts. To examine different copies or versions of a text side by side and note where they differ. Editors of old manuscripts do this.
4. Check a book's pages. In bookbinding and book collecting, to check that all pages and sections are present and in the right order.

In daily office life, the first two senses cover nearly every use.

The collate option on a printer

This is the question behind many searches. When you print several copies of a multi-page document, the printer can work in two ways.

So ticking collate means each copy comes out as a complete set in reading order. Leave it unticked and you get stacks of identical pages.

Using collate in a sentence

• The class monitor collated everyone's project topics into one list for the teacher.
• Could you collate the receipts from the trip before we file the expense claim?
• Researchers collated hospital records from three states to study the outbreak.
• The editor collated two early printings of the poem and found forty small changes.
• Volunteers spent the evening collating and folding newsletters for every house on the street.

Collate usually takes a direct object (collate the data). It often pairs with information, results, responses, evidence, documents and pages, and with phrases such as collate into a report or collate from several sources.

Collate vs collect, compile and correlate

• Collect means simply to gather. You can collect forms without sorting them. Collate adds the idea of putting them in order or combining them so they make sense together.
• Compile is very close to the first sense, but it stresses producing a finished work, such as a list, a report or a book of recipes. In computing, compile also has its own technical meaning.
• Correlate is about a connection between two things: sleep correlates with mood. It sounds similar but means something quite different.
• Collateral shares a first syllable but is unrelated in meaning; see our collateral page for that word.

Origin and the noun collation

Collate is built on Latin collatus, the irregular past participle of conferre, to bring together, which also gave English confer and conference. Its first English sense, from the 1610s, was laying texts side by side to compare them. The bookbinding sense of checking the order of pages is recorded from 1770, and office and printing uses grew from it.

The noun is collation. It can mean the act of collating, and in computing it names the rules a system uses to sort text alphabetically. In older and church usage, a collation is also a light meal, a separate sense that developed from the same Latin word.

Where you meet the word

Office jobs, schools and government departments use collate constantly in instructions: collate the attendance sheets, collate responses by Friday. Researchers use it for pulling studies or records together. Printers and copy shops use it for page order. In Indian offices and exam boards it is common in formal circulars, and in US workplaces it appears most often on printer screens. Good logistics and tidy procurement files both depend on someone who can collate well. For more practical workplace verbs, browse everyday vocabulary.