50 Fun Facts About Collective Nouns

Which collective noun for a group of crows shares its name with a serious crime?

A murder of crows is a gathering of some of the cleverest birds alive: crows make and use tools and can recognise and remember individual human faces.

A group of owls, birds long tied to wisdom, shares its name with which law-making body?

A parliament has named a gathering of birds, especially rooks or owls, since the 15th century. The owl's link with wisdom goes back to Athena in ancient Greece.

An ambush or a streak is the traditional collective noun for a group of which big cats?

Tigers lead largely solitary lives, so an ambush is a rare sight. The word suits a predator that crouches hidden in foliage before it strikes.

A group of flamingos, birds turned pink by their diet, is known by which showy collective noun?

A flamboyance, also called a stand, owes its colour to food: flamingos hatch greyish-red and turn pink or red from the beta-carotene they eat.

Which collective noun names a group of rhinoceroses, the horned heavyweights of Africa and Asia?

A crash is an unusual sight, because adult male rhinoceroses tend to be solitary. Females of the African species sometimes form groups.

Which old word for a group of twenty did Abraham Lincoln use to count years at Gettysburg?

Score comes from an Old Norse word for a notch: herders are thought to have cut one on a tally stick for every twenty animals. Lincoln used it to count back 87 years to 1776.

A 'hand' is the trade name for a tier of which fruit, which grows in large hanging bunches?

Bananas grow in a bunch of around nine tiers called hands, with up to 20 fruits to a hand, and each single fruit is known as a finger.

Which Spanish word for a fleet of warships is tied to the force sent against England in 1588?

Armada is still an everyday word in Spain, where Armada Española is the name of the modern Spanish Navy.

Which collective noun names the huge flocks of starlings that swirl together at dusk?

A murmuration probably takes its name from the sound of the very large flocks starlings form at dusk. Its Medieval Latin root means murmuring or grumbling.

Which collective noun is used for a group of jellyfish, drifters that can gather in vast swarms?

A smack can be real trouble: vast jellyfish swarms have filled fishing nets and clogged the cooling systems of power and desalination plants.

Which word for a group of witches, traditionally thirteen, shares a Latin root with 'convent'?

A coven was a rare word in English until 1921, when Margaret Murray promoted the idea that witches across Europe met in groups of thirteen.

The word 'archipelago', now used for any group of islands, was originally the name of which sea?

The Aegean Sea was called Arcipelago in Italian, and its great number of islands turned a proper name into the general term for any island chain.

A 15th-century list of collective nouns jokingly grouped which legal figures as 'a sentence'?

Judges got 'a Sentence of Juges' in a 1486 list of group names, many of them jokes about people, such as 'a Melody of harpers'.

Which 1486 work, with essays on hawking, hunting and heraldry, popularised English collective nouns?

The Book of Saint Albans also made printing history: its heraldry section shows coats of arms in six colours, the first colour printing in England.

Which talk-show host and drama dean wrote the 1968 collective-noun book An Exaltation of Larks?

James Lipton is best known for hosting Inside the Actors Studio, but his word-lover's book came decades earlier and has stayed in print through several revisions.

Which of the seven deadly sins is also the collective noun for a group of lions?

Pride suits the most social of all wild cats: lions live in groups of related individuals with their offspring, and the females form the stable core.

Which collective noun names a group of ferrets, the slender animals long bred for hunting rabbits?

A business was historically spelled 'busyness'. Other supposed ferret terms such as 'fesnyng' turn up in some dictionaries but are almost certainly ghost words.

Which collective noun for a group of cats has been recorded in English since 1801?

A clowder began as a variation of the word 'clutter'. Cats that gather can also be called a glaring.

Which word names both an archer's case of arrows and, in collective-noun lists, a group of cobras?

A quiver even has a meaning in mathematics: a 1972 paper gave the name to a kind of directed graph, probably because its edges are also called arrows.

A gaggle of geese on the ground becomes which collective noun once airborne in formation?

A skein is also a quantity of yarn or thread wound on a reel, the older sense of a word that came into English from Old French.

A kindle is a traditional collective noun for a litter of which young animals?

Kittens share the word with rabbits: 'to kindle' is an old verb for giving birth, used of rabbits and hares.

A rafter is the collective noun for a flock of which large birds native to North America?

Turkeys in the wild are surprisingly good in the air: though among the heaviest flying birds in the world, wild ones are agile, fast fliers, unlike farmyard birds.

A pandemonium is the collective noun for a group of which noisy, brightly coloured birds?

Parrots get a word coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost, built from Greek and Latin roots meaning 'all' and 'demon'.

A mischief, from an Old French verb for bringing to grief, is the collective noun for which rodents?

Rats share the term with mice: dictionaries define a mischief as a nest or pack of either animal.

Which word names both a series of stairs between two landings and a group of swallows?

A flight also names an air force unit ranked below a squadron, and a row of small tasting glasses of wine.

Which collective noun names the set of eggs a bird lays and sits on in one nesting?

A clutch in this sense has nothing to do with grasping: it is a variant of the dialect word 'cletch', from a Middle English verb meaning to hatch.

Collective nouns for animals are traditionally called 'terms of' what, an old word for the hunt?

Venery comes from the Latin for 'to hunt'. The fanciful group names were a mark of learning for medieval gentlemen who used them correctly, not practical speech.

A herd of zebras, striped members of the horse family, takes which eye-catching collective noun?

A dazzle echoes one theory about stripes: the pattern may dazzle a chasing predator, making it hard to single out one zebra as the herd runs.

Which term for 500 sheets of paper comes from an Arabic word meaning 'bundle'?

A ream owes its name to the Moors, who brought papermaking to Spain: the Arabic word passed into Spanish and then French. The older 'short' count was 480 sheets.

Which prioress is traditionally credited with the hunting essay in a 1486 work rich in collective nouns?

Juliana Berners, said to have been prioress of Sopwell in Hertfordshire, is also remembered as one of the first authors to write on angling, and fly-fishing clubs bear her name.

Which collective noun names a group of sharks, fish with skeletons of cartilage rather than bone?

A shiver is real behaviour, not just wordplay: sharks can be highly social, and more than 100 scalloped hammerheads sometimes gather around seamounts and islands.

A flock of common ravens, the heaviest perching birds, is known by which gloomy collective noun?

An unkindness is one of two dark names for a group of ravens; the other is a conspiracy. Unkindness is sometimes stretched to cover crows as well.

Which collective noun names a group of porcupines, rodents whose quills are modified hairs?

A prickle is a name porcupines share with hedgehogs. A baby porcupine, called a porcupette, is born with soft quills that harden within a few days.

Which rowdy-sounding collective noun names a group of kangaroos, usually ten or more animals?

A mob offers safety in numbers, since living in a group protects weaker kangaroos. Its males are known as boomers and its females as flyers.

Which collective noun names a group of hippos, animals that spend the day keeping cool in water?

A bloat gathers by day and splits up by night: hippos rest close together in the water, but grazing after dusk is a solitary activity.

A group of giraffes, the largest ruminants on Earth, is known by which collective noun?

A tower suits the tallest living land animals. Giraffes live in herds of related females and their young, or in bachelor herds of unrelated males.

Which sombre collective noun is used for a group of vultures while feeding at a carcass?

A wake applies only at mealtimes: vultures circling in the air form a kettle, and those resting on the ground or in trees are a committee.

Which collective noun names a group of apes, the tailless primates of Africa and Southeast Asia?

A shrewdness, strictly speaking, includes us: apes are the tailless primates, a group that takes in gibbons, the great apes and humans.

Which collective noun names a group of male cheetahs, often brothers, defending one territory?

A coalition usually consists of brothers from the same litter who stayed together after weaning, though unrelated males are often allowed to join.

Which collective noun, also a word for a formal assembly of clergy, is used for a group of eagles?

A convocation can also be a university's formal academic assembly, a lofty word for birds that sit at the top of the food chain as apex predators.

A parade is a collective noun for a herd of which large mammals when on the move?

Elephants on parade follow a matriarch: each female group is led by one cow, usually the oldest.

A romp is the collective noun for a group of which playful, web-footed river mammals?

Otters earn the name: they appear to play for sheer enjoyment, making waterslides and sliding down them into the water.

A scurry, also known as a dray, is the collective noun for a group of which rodents?

Squirrels have large incisors that keep growing throughout life, and in temperate regions they commonly cache nuts under leaf litter or underground.

A cackle is the collective noun for a group of which carnivores, a family of just four living species?

Hyenas inspired a simile long before the group name: 'to laugh like a hyena' appears in Shakespeare's As You Like It, thanks to the spotted hyena's hysterical-sounding call.

A wisdom is the rare collective noun for a group of which burrowing Australian marsupials?

Wombats mark their territory with cube-shaped droppings, a puzzle whose physics won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.

Which collective noun for a flock of goldfinches once also meant the mixed sound of many voices?

A charm suits a bird with a rich symbolic life: because goldfinches eat thistle seeds, Christian symbolism links them with the crown of thorns.

The 'school' in a school of fish is unrelated to classrooms and comes from which language?

Dutch gave English this school: the Middle Dutch 'scole' meant a multitude or troop, and the word is a doublet of 'shoal'. The classroom kind goes back to Latin.

Which word for the cardinals gathered to elect a pope comes from the Latin for 'with a key'?

A conclave reflects a rule of 1274, when Pope Gregory X decreed that the electors be locked in seclusion until a new pope had been chosen.

A siege is the collective noun for a flock of which long-legged wading birds?

Herons give the word two bird meanings: a siege is also the spot where a single heron sits looking out for prey, from the Old French for 'seat'.

An embarrassment is the whimsical collective noun for which bears, solitary animals that gather only to mate?

Giant pandas rarely form an embarrassment at all: each lives alone, keeps in touch through scent marks on rocks and trees, and gathers only in mating seasons.