collection

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

• noun The act or process of collecting.
• noun A group of objects or works to be seen, studied, or kept together.
• noun A line of products produced for one season, as those developed by a designer.
• noun An accumulation; a deposit.
• noun A collecting of money, as in church.
• noun The sum so collected.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act or practice of collecting or of gathering together: as, the collection of rare books.
• noun An assemblage or gathering of objects; a number of things collected, gathered, or brought together; a number of objects considered as constituting one whole of which the single objects are parts: as, a collection of pictures; a collection of essays; a collection of minerals.
• noun Specifically A sum of money collected for religious or charitable purposes, especially during a religious service.
• noun The act of deducing consequences; inference from premises; that which is deduced or inferred; an inference; sometimes, specifically, an inductive inference.
• noun A private examination at the end of each term at the colleges of the English universities.
• noun The act of receiving or compelling payment of dues, public or private, as for taxes, customs duties, or personal debts.
• noun The jurisdiction of a collector; a collectorship. See collector, 3.
• noun Synonyms Assemblage, group, crowd, mass, lot, heap; compilation, selection.
• noun Contribution.
• noun In logic, many independent or discrete objects regarded as a single object composed of these objects.
• noun A plural object: an individual object whose existence consists in the existence of whatever individuals may have been mentally connected and regarded as parts of it.

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

• noun The act or process of collecting or of gathering.
• noun That which is collected.
• noun A gathering or assemblage of objects or of persons.
• noun A gathering of money for charitable or other purposes, as by passing a contribution box for freewill offerings.
• noun That which is obtained in payment of demands.
• noun An accumulation of any substance.
• noun obsolete The act of inferring or concluding from premises or observed facts; also, that which is inferred.
• noun engraving The jurisdiction of a collector of excise.

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

• noun A set of items or objects procured or gathered together by a person, group, or other agent.
• noun Multiple related objects associated as a group.
• noun The activity of collecting.
• noun topology, analysis A set of sets.

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

• noun request for a sum of money
• noun the act of gathering something together
• noun a publication containing a variety of works
• noun several things grouped together or considered as a whole