Collective Nouns
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Collective Nouns trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
English has a strange habit of giving every gathering its own name. Geese come in a gaggle, wolves in a pack and fish in a school, and that is before the language gets playful. Many of the oddest terms began as medieval hunting slang, a way for gentlemen to show off their learning, and later writers kept adding to the list for fun. This quiz covers groups of things of every kind: birds, big cats and sea creatures, but also people, ships, fruit and paper. Some questions give you the animal and ask for the group name; others turn it around. A few look at where the words came from and who first wrote them down. It suits pub quiz regulars, word lovers, teachers and anyone who has ever wondered what to call a field full of the same animal. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few new favourites.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which collective noun for a group of crows shares its name with a serious crime?
A murder
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.
Q 02A group of owls, birds long tied to wisdom, shares its name with which law-making body?
A parliament
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.
Q 03An ambush or a streak is the traditional collective noun for a group of which big cats?
Tigers
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.
Q 04A group of flamingos, birds turned pink by their diet, is known by which showy collective noun?
A flamboyance
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.
Q 05Which collective noun names a group of rhinoceroses, the horned heavyweights of Africa and Asia?
A crash
A crash is an unusual sight, because adult male rhinoceroses tend to be solitary. Females of the African species sometimes form groups.
Q 06Which old word for a group of twenty did Abraham Lincoln use to count years at Gettysburg?
Score
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.
Q 07A 'hand' is the trade name for a tier of which fruit, which grows in large hanging bunches?
Bananas
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.
Q 08Which Spanish word for a fleet of warships is tied to the force sent against England in 1588?
Armada
Armada is still an everyday word in Spain, where Armada Española is the name of the modern Spanish Navy.
Q 09Which collective noun names the huge flocks of starlings that swirl together at dusk?
A murmuration
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.
Q 10Which collective noun is used for a group of jellyfish, drifters that can gather in vast swarms?
A smack
A smack can be real trouble: vast jellyfish swarms have filled fishing nets and clogged the cooling systems of power and desalination plants.
Q 11Which word for a group of witches, traditionally thirteen, shares a Latin root with 'convent'?
A coven
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.
Q 12The word 'archipelago', now used for any group of islands, was originally the name of which sea?
The Aegean 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.
Q 13A 15th-century list of collective nouns jokingly grouped which legal figures as 'a sentence'?
Judges
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'.
Q 21A kindle is a traditional collective noun for a litter of which young animals?
Kittens
Kittens share the word with rabbits: 'to kindle' is an old verb for giving birth, used of rabbits and hares.
Q 22A rafter is the collective noun for a flock of which large birds native to North America?
Turkeys
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.
Q 23A pandemonium is the collective noun for a group of which noisy, brightly coloured birds?
Parrots
Parrots get a word coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost, built from Greek and Latin roots meaning 'all' and 'demon'.
Q 14Which 1486 work, with essays on hawking, hunting and heraldry, popularised English collective nouns?
The Book of Saint Albans
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.
Q 15Which talk-show host and drama dean wrote the 1968 collective-noun book An Exaltation of Larks?
James Lipton
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.
Q 16Which of the seven deadly sins is also the collective noun for a group of lions?
Pride
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.
Q 17Which collective noun names a group of ferrets, the slender animals long bred for hunting rabbits?
A business
A business was historically spelled 'busyness'. Other supposed ferret terms such as 'fesnyng' turn up in some dictionaries but are almost certainly ghost words.
Q 18Which collective noun for a group of cats has been recorded in English since 1801?
A clowder
A clowder began as a variation of the word 'clutter'. Cats that gather can also be called a glaring.
Q 19Which word names both an archer's case of arrows and, in collective-noun lists, a group of cobras?
A quiver
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.
Q 20A gaggle of geese on the ground becomes which collective noun once airborne in formation?
A skein
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.
Q 24A mischief, from an Old French verb for bringing to grief, is the collective noun for which rodents?
Rats
Rats share the term with mice: dictionaries define a mischief as a nest or pack of either animal.
Q 25Which word names both a series of stairs between two landings and a group of swallows?
A flight
A flight also names an air force unit ranked below a squadron, and a row of small tasting glasses of wine.
Q 26Which collective noun names the set of eggs a bird lays and sits on in one nesting?
A clutch
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.
Q 27Collective nouns for animals are traditionally called 'terms of' what, an old word for the hunt?
Venery
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.
Q 28A herd of zebras, striped members of the horse family, takes which eye-catching collective noun?
A dazzle
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.
Q 29Which term for 500 sheets of paper comes from an Arabic word meaning 'bundle'?
A ream
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.
Q 30Which prioress is traditionally credited with the hunting essay in a 1486 work rich in collective nouns?
Juliana Berners
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.