A flock of birds. A brood of hens. A herd of swans. A flock of pigeons.
But what do you call a group of ravens? And crows? What about larks? And owls? Starlings?
I’ve known about the ravens and the crows but then started researching and discovered the rest.
Are there any lovers of the beautiful English language who know?
Answers will be provided shortly.
A group of Owls is a parliament as far as I am aware. Not sure about the others though, sorry.
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This site agrees with you: http://www.birdnature.com/groupnames.html. However I disagree with their entries for seagulls (colony) and pigeons (flight), which should be “meanfilthyasshole” and “fatsonofabitch”, respectively. Grackles aren’t listed but they should be a “shutthefuckupalready”.
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Owls do not congregate in groups, so I suspect that there is no such collective noun for them. I have heard ‘gaggle of geese’ and one nice one which I do not recall just now for peacocks. I have never heard ‘herd of swans’ though.
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The site I linked says peacocks are also a murder (though they can also be an ostentation). Because when you think peacocks, first thing that comes to mind is homicide.
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Hmmm. I think you are right Jamie. I have indeed heard of a parliament of owls. But I still think it is a contrived noun which never applies in the real world. A ‘pride of lions’ on the other hand does indeed.
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These terms, while endearing and often collected, are not actually well established. They’re on lists because somebody went looking for them in literature, and found an “exaltation of larks”, or what have you, in one poem — not because they’re attested with any frequency in any corpus of more general writing.
I was saddened to find even the great Louis Zukofsky, perhaps the most language-aware poet we’ve had in the US, copying such a list into his magnum opus “A”. Admittedly it was “A”-12, the most inclusive, scrapbook-like canto, but still.
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There’s a whole book about this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Exaltation-Larks-Ultimate-James-Lipton/dp/0140170960
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I did a Google Books search for “of larks” just now. Apart from references to that book, I didn’t see any hits for “exaltation” — rather “flight”, “flock”, “multitude”, even “bunch”.
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Right. That was a cute concept for a book, but really most speakers of English only use a few common expressions for groupings of animals and birds, a pack of wild dogs, school of fish, or a pride of lions, but not an X of gazelles or a Y of giraffes.
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Exactly. And there is a book by Ruth Rendell titled The Unkindness of Ravens. The book is rubbish (which is rare with this great author), but the title is priceless.
So it’s “the unkindness of ravens.”
All of these poetic terms can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collective_nouns_for_birds
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I know it’s a murder of crows. It may also be a murder of ravens, but I’m unsure of that.
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The murder of crows is right! But the expression is even lovelier with ravens. 🙂
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“Unkindness of ravens” gave its name not only to two novels and one musical group, it also recently appeared on a popular TV show where a character writes a book with this title.
I think these expressions are beautiful.
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A murmuration of starlings – I’ve always thought that was a lovely term, and so appropriate.
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Why not “a murder of soldiers”?
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What about a parliament of rooks? I learned it from Gaiman’s Sandman comics.
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I was scrolling down to see if somebody brought up this one. I have to say that I also learnt it through Sandman, one of the best comics ever written!
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A medieval hunting treatise attributed to Dame Juliana Berners contains, at the end, a number of collective nouns, not only for animals but also some for humans, which I think must be jokes: for example, a damnation of jurors. Or maybe it was a damnation of judges (it has been awhile since Juliana and I got together). But you get the drift: (a) these things go back to the medieval period, and (b) people then were also amused by these names.
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I’m pretty sure it’s a murder of ravens. Soooo creepy-sounding.
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