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A short history of…

Why a group of crows is a murder, where the words came from, and whether anyone ever really said them.

What is a collective noun?

A collective noun names a group taken as a whole. Most are general-purpose: a group, a herd, a flock or a swarm can describe many kinds of thing. A smaller set is tied to one kind of animal, so a pride is always lions and never cows. These specific terms are called terms of venery, from an old word for hunting. Other names for them include nouns of assembly, company terms, gatherations and agminals.

English also makes collectives by adding endings: -age and -ade turn bag into baggage and block into blockade. Other languages do the same thing more systematically. German adds Ge- (Gebirge, a mountain range, from Berg, mountain), and Esperanto adds -ar- (arbo “tree”, arbaro “forest”).

A timeline

  1. c. 1250

    Walter of Bibbesworth’s Treatise

    An Anglo-Norman French teaching poem and the earliest known source, in any European vernacular language, for collective nouns of animals. It is also the earliest source for animal noises.

  2. 1300s

    Hunting manuals

    The fashion for a specialised hunting language arrives in England from France. William Twiti’s Venerie (early 14th century) and Gaston Phoebus’s hunting book (later 14th century) multiply technical terms, giving different names to the same feature in different animals. Extending the vocabulary becomes a courtly game.

  3. Early 1400s

    The Master of the Game

    The terminology keeps growing. By the 15th century the habit has reached exaggerated, even satirical, proportions.

  4. c. 1452

    Egerton MS 1995

    A manuscript list headed “termis of venery &c.” collects about 70 collective terms.

  5. 1486

    The Book of Saint Albans

    Printed at St Albans and traditionally credited to Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of nearby Sopwell, its list “The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys” runs to 164 entries. Many are about people rather than game, and plainly joking: “a Doctryne of doctoris”, “a Sentence of Juges”, “a Gagle of women”, a superfluity of nuns. It is the source of an unkindness of ravens, a murmuration of starlings and an exaltation of larks.

  6. 1500s

    A bestseller

    Wynkyn de Worde reprints the book at Westminster, adding a treatise on fishing. It goes through so many 16th-century editions that it is hard to keep count. That popularity keeps the terms in circulation.

  7. 1595

    Gervase Markham, The Gentleman’s Academie

    Markham edits and comments on the Saint Albans list for a new generation of gentlemen.

  8. 1801

    Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England

    Antiquarians like Strutt carry the old lists into the modern era.

  9. 1907–1910

    John Hodgkin, “Proper Terms”

    A 187-page study in the Transactions of the Philological Society tries to explain the meaning of every phrase in the Saint Albans list.

  10. 1968

    James Lipton, An Exaltation of Larks

    Lipton revives the medieval terms and, following the Saint Albans example, invents hundreds of his own for modern people. The expanded 1993 “Ultimate Edition” has more than 1,000 terms.

  11. 2000s–

    Contests, comics and podcasts

    Coining new terms becomes a popular game: radio and magazine contests, the 2009 Wondermark comic “Supernatural Collective Nouns” (a dignity of dragons), and a listener’s rogue of skeptics on The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

Did anyone actually use them?

Mostly, no. Even in the 15th century the terms worked like kennings, the poetic stand-ins of Old English verse. Knowing the right one marked you as a well-bred gentleman; it wasn’t how huntsmen actually talked to each other. Many of the Saint Albans terms, such as a business of ferrets, a fall of woodcocks and a shrewdness of apes, appear on lists far more often than they appear in real sentences. Others have become obscure because the words in them have changed meaning, like a cete of badgers or a dopping of sheldrakes.

Some do describe something real. A parliament of rooks matches the noisy gatherings of rooks in their treetop nests. An exaltation of larks fits the skylark’s singing climb. A murmuration catches the sound of a starling flock coming in to roost, and a spring of teal describes how the ducks burst up from the water. An unkindness of ravens draws on an old belief that ravens push their young out of the nest.

And some, like a gaggle of geese, a pack of dogs or a pride of lions, simply became ordinary English.

Is a group singular or plural?

American English almost always treats a collective noun as singular: “the team is winning”. British English allows both, depending on meaning. “The team is in the dressing room” treats the team as one unit, while “the team are arguing among themselves” is about its members. The same goes for sports clubs and bands: “Arsenal have won” in London, “Arsenal has won” in New York.

About this site

This dictionary combines Wikipedia’s List of animal names, Wiktionary’s Appendix: English collective nouns, the references those pages cite, and a few hand-picked additions. It holds 512 words, used for 468 subjects across 855 entries. 160 entries are traced to the Book of Saint Albans.

Sources and further reading