Why is a group of crows called a ‘murder’? How do you describe a gathering of foxes? Our columnist explores the origins of collective nouns
On the face of it, the two words ‘collective noun’ are unlikely to get anyone’s pulse racing.
Like many terms in my job, their cold exterior can be a little off-putting. Dig a little deeper, though, and the magic begins. I’ve discovered there are few areas of language that get people going quite as much as whether the correct group name for politicians is a posse or an odium, or whether penguins really do come in waddles. And that’s just for starters.
As a lexicographer, I’m often asked for the correct collective noun for various things. By ‘correct’ the questioner means the one that is sanctioned by the dictionary and is therefore ‘official’.
In truth, English has no linguistic government that tells us what is right and wrong. Its evolution won’t please everyone all of the time, but like any democracy, it answers to the will of the people. In the case of collective nouns, the people with the greatest influence lived many centuries ago.
The examples we know and love today – a ‘murmuration’ of starlings, an ‘exaltation’ of larks, a ‘murder’ of crows – were born in the Middle Ages, written down in books of etiquette that helped the elite avoid embarrassment while out hunting or hawking. For the medieval nobleman, knowing that the correct term for a group of bears was a ‘sleuth’, for foxes a ‘skulk’, and for hounds a ‘cry’, was a necessary badge of honour.
One manual in particular had a huge influence on today’s collective nouns. The Book of St Albans, produced in 1486, contained more than 160 group names both for beasts of the chase and for characters on the medieval stage. It was an enormous hit, not least because it also contained the first images to be printed in colour in England. More than half a millennium on, we still use many of the book’s examples. A ‘superfluity’ of nuns may seem odd to us now, but it was born in an era when convents were packed with noblewomen who had passed the marriageable age and who faced spinning for a living (as a literal ‘spinster’) unless they entered religious service.
Other collective nouns tell us a lot about beliefs at the time. Before starlings formed a ‘murmura
