What is a collective noun?
A collective noun names a group as a single thing: family, team and flock are all collective nouns. In British English you can use a singular or a plural verb with one, so “the pride of lions is resting” and “the pride of lions are resting” are both fine.
The names people use every day
Most animal groups have plain, everyday names like these.
| Animals | Group name |
|---|---|
| cows and other cattle, elephants | a herd |
| sheep, goats and many birds | a flock |
| bees | a swarm |
| dogs, wolves | a pack |
| fish | a school or a shoal |
| rabbits, bees | a colony |
| puppies, kittens | a litter |
Myth: Every animal has one correct collective noun.
What the evidence says: There is no rule. Even the old lists gave some animals two names, and geese can be a flock, a gaggle or, when they are flying, a skein.
Where the fancy names come from
In the 1400s there was a fashion for “terms of venery”: special names for groups of animals, especially the animals people hunted. They were meant for gentlemen, and for anyone careful about how they spoke. Lists of these terms were copied into handwritten books, and one was printed at St Albans in 1486, in a book about hawking and hunting.
That printed list is headed “The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys”. It includes “a Pride of Lionys”, “a Gagle of gees” and “an Exaltyng of Larkis”, and some of its names are plain ones we still use, like “a Swarme of bees” and “a Flocke of Shepe”.
Others were more playful. Ravens got “an vnkyndenes”, an unkindness, and Merriam-Webster calls some of the terms “rather fanciful”.
Most of them never caught on. Merriam-Webster says most “fell out of use in the 16th century”. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, quoted in a 1909 study of the lists, said of gaggle that “unlike most of the others, it seems to have been actually adopted in use”.
The crows and the owls
A murder of crows really is old. It turns up in lists written in the 1400s, with spellings such as “a mursher of Crowys”. But it is not in the 1486 St Albans list, and nobody knows for sure why crows were given the name.
Myth: A group of crows is called a murder.
What the evidence says: It can be, and dictionaries record it, but it is a poetic name. Scientists call a group of crows a flock.
Myth: A parliament of owls is an old medieval term.
What the evidence says: None of the old lists collected in a 1909 study has a parliament of anything; the 1486 list gives rooks a building. Merriam-Webster counts a parliament of owls among the more modern collective nouns.
Newer names
People still make these up. In 1968 the writer James Lipton published An Exaltation of Larks, a book that brought back old terms and added new ones of his own, such as “an unction of undertakers”. Nobody decides which new ones count; anyone can make one up.
Questions people ask
What is a group of owls called?
Like any group of birds, a flock. A parliament of owls is a playful modern name rather than an old hunting term.
Is it a school of fish or a shoal of fish?
Both, and in everyday English they mean much the same. Scientists who study fish draw a line between them: a shoal is any group of fish that stay together, and a school is a shoal that is all swimming the same way, in step.
What is a group of geese called?
A gaggle or a flock when they are on the ground, and sometimes a skein when they are flying.
What is a group of starlings called?
A murmuration. It is in the 1486 list, spelt murmuracion, and it is one of the old terms still in real use: the RSPB uses it in its guide to watching starlings in winter.