Collective Nouns for Animals, From a Murder to a Parliament
A murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a crash of rhinos. The full working list of animal collective nouns, where the strange ones came from, and which are actually used.
Collective nouns are a quiz staple and a crossword gift, because the answers are short, vivid and unmistakable. Most of the famous ones come from a single source: The Book of Saint Albans, printed in 1486, which listed "terms of venery" used by hunters. A good number were jokes even then.
Birds
| Animal | Collective noun |
|---|---|
| Crows | A murder |
| Ravens | An unkindness |
| Owls | A parliament |
| Geese (on the ground) | A gaggle |
| Geese (in flight) | A skein |
| Larks | An exaltation |
| Goldfinches | A charm |
| Starlings | A murmuration |
| Peacocks | An ostentation |
| Magpies | A tiding |
| Nightingales | A watch |
| Flamingos | A flamboyance |
| Jays | A band |
| Herons | A siege |
Mammals
| Animal | Collective noun |
|---|---|
| Lions | A pride |
| Rhinos | A crash |
| Hippos | A bloat |
| Otters | A raft |
| Hyenas | A cackle |
| Zebras | A dazzle |
| Giraffes | A tower |
| Porcupines | A prickle |
| Kangaroos | A mob |
| Bats | A colony or cloud |
| Ferrets | A business |
| Moles | A labour |
| Apes | A shrewdness |
| Whales | A pod |
Everything else
A shiver of sharks. A smack of jellyfish. A bask of crocodiles. A knot of toads. A bed of oysters. A cloud of grasshoppers. A scourge of mosquitoes. A float of crocodiles in water. An army of frogs. A rhumba of rattlesnakes.
Which of these are real?
It depends what you mean by real. Terms like pride, pod, flock, herd, swarm and gaggle are in genuine everyday use. Terms like shrewdness of apes and unkindness of ravens have been copied from list to list for five centuries without ever being used by anyone describing actual animals.
That does not make them wrong — they are recorded in the dictionaries and they are what quizzes expect — but it is worth knowing that the 1486 book was partly a joke book for gentlemen, alongside a superfluity of nuns and a doctrine of doctors.
The short ones for crosswords
3: pod, mob. 4: herd, pack, raft, knot, bevy, cast, army. 5: pride, swarm, flock, crash, bloat, troop, charm, skein. 6: gaggle, colony, cackle, dazzle, prickle. 7: murder, shiver.