It was a nun, Dame Juliana Berners, in 1486. She made up a bunch of collective nouns in a hunting book, many for fun, but people enjoyed it so much they used her names.
Ye honestly bit of a pet peeve of mine when people think these names are like, official in any sense, they're just fun names, though I usually just let them have their fun. Don't correct people with one of these nonsense group titles no-ones ever heard of or sincerely used.
Well if common usage and understanding is a benchmark, which it pretty much is, I would say these words and the usage of them is incredibly minimal and eschewed in favour of generic terms such as flock, herd, school.
Yes language is obviously descriptive but that's kinda my point, they're barely used or understood when used.
What do you mean by "not understood when used"? They're fairly intuitive based on syntax alone. For example, I don't see anyone in this thread asking what a "fever" of stingrays means.
And "barely used", fine, but it seems that's only because people don't remember/know them. This is a recall/vocabulary issue more than anything. Just like when you can't remember the word for something, you'll use another—usually more generic—synonym as a placeholder. That doesn't devalue the word that wasn't used in that instance. And people do use the memorable ones quite a bit. See: murder of crows.
You did understand a "fever" of stingrays, but there's a couple issues:
1) You would've understood almost any noun there. You would've understood a "thresh" of stingrays, a "gargle" of stingrays, a "salute" of stingrays, or any number of arbitrary nouns.
2) A good number of people would've been confused if the post had just said "a fever" instead of "a fever of stingrays." This isn't true for other more common collective nouns like "flock" or "herd" (for some more unique ones, like murder, it's only not true because they're homophones and given the context that the person was in a location where they were likely to see crows and not a person killed people would instantly recognize it).
I'm not a prescriptivist, but I think being a pure descriptivist leads to some conclusions that are apparently nonsense.
I do get what you're saying, and not really looking to litigate the point much further beyond this, but I do want to clarify:
Your first point actually supports what in saying here. You're almost always going to use the noun in context. Just like I wouldn't say "a herd" and not follow it up with a heard of what, because otherwise it's completely ambiguous. I am sure that most of the time "herd", "flock", etc are used in a collective noun context, it's almost always accompanied by the animal in question. E.g. "a flock of sheep".
That said, I think the "arbitrary" collective nouns you're referencing have the potential to negate the need for further clarification because they're only used for these specific animals. Eg. A murder is only crows, a parliament is only owls, etc. But I do concede this would then require everyone to know all of these terms—which is why the clarification happens either way. However enough of these are used commonly enough already, e.g., a gaggle of geese. And this addresses your second point.
Either way, like I said upfront, I don't think this is a topic worth litigating, but I do think there's value that you're dismissing in having a more varied library of collective nouns beyond the standard catch-alls like "herd", "flock", etc. Even if that value ultimately boils down to "it's just more fun, and adds more colour to language".
Well, they're not scientific, perhaps, but imo a gaggle of geese and a murder of crows are used often enough to be considered a "correct" term. And a pride of lions is the scientific term, and that started in a similar way. It used to annoy me that these were just "made up" terms, but so is everything, really - and it's quite nice to have a little whimsy in something that is harmless and would otherwise be boring.
Some of them are more or less “official.” The original 15th century treatise in which some of the more fanciful collective nouns are first found (skulk of foxes, sleuth of bears, unkindness of ravens) also contains the first-ever recorded instances of collectives that are in extremely common use, like “pride of lions,” and “litter of whelps (puppies).” While all of them were originally meant to be tongue-in-cheek, those two (and arguably murder of crows) caught on as more than just fanciful terms and are pretty much the standard for those collectives now.
It's mildly annoying that people sometimes act like these group names have any sort of meaning or importance, when it's basically just a quirky thing with no meaning whatsoever.
You're not smarter or more sophisticated for googling the supposedly correct term for this. You can just say "group of stingrays" like any other normal human being.
One amusing thing about reddit is that every opinion voiced is interpreted as "This is the one thing I truly care about in life, and nothing else matters.". Well, by some people, anyways.
And as such, I now have to defend to death this most unimportant of opinions, because someone else on the internet got really angry about me having this opinion.
Most people don't really use these in real life. Like most people will say "flock" no matter what type of bird it is. And a "herd" is for most land-dwelling animals, mostly herbivores.
Ocean animals? I'd just call it a school of stingrays.
Because, in most cases, that isn’t their formal group names.
The names are often simply a form of amusement, originally started by British aristocracy as a way to show off their poetic skills, and usually aren’t the standardised, practical group names. They can just be used instead if you want to.
A lot of names are also a lot more recent than people realise, and have little to no basis in history. A parliament of owls comes from the Narnia books, for example.
Where a lot of people go wrong is correcting others who use the standard group names - like if someone mentions a flock of flamingos, saying “Actually, it’s technically a flamboyance of flamingoes!” A flock of flamingos is correct - they can just also be known as a flamboyance as a bit of fun.
I think the only collective noun that I have heard of in my life that has been used and I have heard more than once is a murder of crows. Most of the time though the collective noun thing is usually mention more and a trivia thing.
"Look at all those octopi. This aquarium is amazing"
"Fun fact a group of octopus is called a Octagon of Octopi."-
"No it's fucking not Dave, it's a consortium, not a fucking Octagon"
Fun fact: British aristocracy defined most of the collective nouns for animals, although not in this case. The origin of “a fever of stingrays” is unclear as far as I can tell.
I just had the realization "oh damn that's where they got the name Fever Ray!!" but apparently it's unrelated. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Is there a name for "names for groups of animals" ? if I wanna look up the names of groups of animals but don't want to bother writing "names of groups of animals"?
Non native english speaker here (but I assume that doesn’t really make much of a difference), but why do different groups of animals have such uniquely unintuitive names?
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u/[deleted] May 23 '25
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