Collective Nouns

Aloha Friends,

Nouns are often categorised into:

1. Proper Noun
2. Common Noun
3. Collective Noun
4. Abstract Noun

A Collective Noun refers to a number of persons or things taken together and spoken of as a whole.

The first collection of English collective nouns was put together in 1486 and is traditionally ascribed to Dame Juliana Barnes. Her collection was probably originally written in French, putting together earlier works on the same subject, but Dame Juliana undoubtedly invented several of the terms.

A few of these terms are:

A dole of doves

A turmoil of porpoises

A shoal of minnows

A business of ferrets

A party of jays

An unkindness of ravens (so called because the birds were thought to push their young from the nest to teach them self-sufficiency).

A superfluity of nuns

A prudence of vicars

Collective nouns are also used to make fun of or to praise other groups. For e.g.

A yawn of politicians

An eloquence of lawyers (usually used by lawyers) or A deceit of lawyers (used by everyone else).

There are a lot more such terms. In fact I think there are about 164 such terms put together by Dame Juliana. If you can think of some of them can you add to the collection in the Comments section.

Ciao