Collective nouns: peculiar ways of calling groups of animals

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Collective nouns are singular nouns that refer to a group of elements. In Spanish, we have very curious examples that do not look at all like the individual nouns that they group, such as "enjambre" or "foliage" or "tropa", but they are not something particularly remarkable.


However, there are an extraordinary number of collective nouns in English, especially poland phone number list it comes to groups of animals . From “ a murder of crows ” to “ a flamboyance of flamingoes ,” there are a great many animals that have their own collective name, usually based on an existing word. In fact, there are about seventy words for groups of animals of different species.

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This disproportionate richness is due, like many other oddities of the language, to French influence . We bring you a list of the most striking collective names of animals.



A group of…
Take a look at this list. Does any of them sound familiar? While there are some more common terms, such as “ herd ” (wild or farmed herbivores), “pod” (aquatic animals) or “flock” (birds), there are some collective nouns that are used for one or two species of animals. Look up the meanings of the words in bold, you might be surprised: