Other forms: collectives
Collective means done by or belonging to a group as a whole. Everybody together, not one at a time.
It attaches to a great many nouns: collective responsibility, collective bargaining, a collective decision, the collective memory of a town. Each means that no individual can be separated out. Grammar has collective nouns, like team and family, which are singular in form and often take a plural verb in British English. As a noun, a collective is a group who own and run something jointly.
1adjectivecollectiveDone by or belonging to all the members of a group.
“The decision was a collective one.”
2nounrunA group of people who own or run something jointly.
“They set up a workers' collective.”
Collective is a gathering together. Latin colligō joins com, together, to legō, to gather, and it is the same legō that gives us collect.
Proto-Indo-European
*leǵ-
Latin
collēctīvus
Middle French
collectif
English, today
collective
Built from
From Middle French collectif, from Latin collēctīvus. From Middle French collectif, from Latin collēctīvus, from collēctus, past participle of colligō (“to collect”), from com- (“together”) + legō (“to gather”). Compare French collectif. a doublet of colectivo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA