What does "collectional" mean?

Of or pertaining to collecting, gathering, or grouping items together.

Collectional

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Adjective

1
Of or pertaining to collecting, gathering, or grouping items together. not-comparable
"In the stage of collectional economy man appropriates nature's gifts. This has been called the hunting and fishing stage."
2
Of or pertaining to a collection (set of items gathered together or a set of related items) or collections. not-comparable
"Considering that that colony is only seventy-five years old, of which the first twenty-five must have been wasted for collectional purposes, there is a well-arranged and perfectly systematical collection of fossil remains, birds, beasts, shells, &c., which reflects the highest credit on Dr. Krebs, who is the Curator."
3
Pertaining to a collection (set of pitch classes). not-comparable
"The "collectional information" one receives is ambiguous since the collection { C, E, F, G, A } occurs in the key of C and in the key of F"
4
Pertaining to all elements of a collection simultaneously, rather than to the individual elements of the collection or to the collection as a whole. not-comparable
"Such quantifiers are characterized as dispensive(or distributive), and are distinguished from collective reference (e.g. "All S, taken together, are P") and collectional reference (e.g. "All S, separately but simultaneously, are P")."

"In the stage of collectional economy man appropriates nature's gifts. This has been called the hunting and fishing stage."

From collection + -al.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.