Talk:Collective noun
From Academic Kids
In a break from usual tradition of "edit as you see fit" I'm going to ask people to list new candidate nouns here. I am running an Access database which generates the table scripts automatically - it is a lot easier than scrolling through all that wiki-code.
If you modify or correct something, could you also list it here, so I can edit the database. If anyone wants the db, just email me (address is on my personal page). It's currently only 200K in size.
Please list candidates here. If you can find a dictionary reference for it, please say so. Many collective nouns are obscure and archaic - hence a citation from any (respectable) dictionary will be deemed to validate the term.
If you know the term is spurious, then say so. I have no problem listing spurious nouns, so long as they are clearly marked as such. Things like "a clutch of mechanics" have humour value, even if illegitimate. - MMGB
Nice one, Manning, I wish I'd thought of doing this! I'll put some more up for the collection, and many thanks for your help with this. sjc
- shelfful of books - carpet of flowers - drift of snow - stack of papers, cards - arsenal of weapons - hail of bullets - coil of stamps - tissue of lies - circle of friends - trail of tears - growth of trees - series of games - hand of cards - pack of cards - can of worms - I think this only refers to a problematic situation, and is not a collective term for worms - sleeze of sponges (possible spelling issues)
This should live on collective noun, shouldn't it? And, given that we're not going to have subpages, all the subpages could conveniently live on, e.g., collective nouns sorted by subject and collective nouns for birds. --LMS
Oh bugger. - MMGB
Sorry, really I am. :-) --LMS
This is a cool idea. Anthology of prostitutes. Heh, heh. Not brilliant prose, but I just wanted to contratulate you, Manning. I think it's good work! <>< tbc
Actually, I originally started this Talk page to try to get a better definition of the subject at hand. I gave a couple of examples that I thought might be questionable, thinking that they might have been omitted for a definite reason. They weren't really intended as suggested additions, but rather to try to identify the scope of the subject. Partly this was because lots of obvious ones were missing. For example, deck of cards is included, but not stack of cards, or pile of cards, or hand of cards. Am I to understand that all these should be included, but the list just isn't yet complete? -HWR
Always assume the list isn't complete. - MMGB
- drift of snow - isn't this singular?
Wouldn't that exclusion also apply to:
- anthology of prose - heap of trash - slew of homework - wad of money
hmmm... fair comment. - MMGB
Prose, money and those
I've got a list I've had lying around on my hard drive for quite a while, which was based off of information in Paul Hellweg's "Insomniac's Dictionary." Rather than check the existing lists and cull out duplicates, though, I figured I'd let you do all the hard work for me with your fancy-dancy database. :)
Paul has a whole whack of references at the back of his book, but doesn't specify which ones these came out of. Still, the book seems well-researched, so perhaps it counts as a suitable reference on its own.
(long list deleted, one by one...) Every single item you listed was already included, except for the one listed below. I'm waiting for opinions as to what to do with this one.
Wolves Route - currently listed as "rout". couldn't find a citation for "route"
- Looks like a typo or an American unfamiliar with the English word "rout" to me... I always thought it was a rout of wolves, myself. sjcTW:
a quarrel of crossbow bolts
sjc
Also, Manning, I notice that goldfinches are no longer referenced as a charm. I have always referred to them as a charm (we get about twenty or so of them at a time in our garden in summer sometimes), and so does everyone else I know who knows what they're on about! They are perfectly delightful. I am reinstating the most prevalent usage of charm as a collective noun (in my neck of the woods at any case). sjc
- After 50 or so of them flew up in my face out of some high grass, I coined the phrase "rush of goldfinches". Gold rush, get it.
Could someone whose opinion of collective nouns is slightly more NPOV than my personal burning hatred point out in the intro to the article that collective nouns are not a fixed construction of the English language -- one can refer to a group of any sort of thing as just that, a "group", or indeed mix and match in any way one sees fit. This would be for the benefit of non-native speakers: I would hate them to think they actually have to learn all this rubbish. Collective nouns are very much a literary game, and even that is a tenous description as any writer worth their salt recognises them as dead metaphors. -- Tarquin 15:44 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)
- The worst mistake I have made in my Wikipedia career was rudely and ignorantly trashing one of the collective nouns collections (both verbally, and due to a browser bug, physically). I have stayed away from them since then, out of some combination of embarrassment and good manners, so I can't be the one to clear up this either, but all this stuff is distinctly countereducational. I hate hurting people's feelings. I have stayed away from this since my first weeks in Wikipedia and even took it off my Watchlist because I was so upset with myself, but Tarquin's comments have brought me reluctantly back to the issue. Fun's fun, but somehow this isn't fun.
- Here is my summary.
- Like Tarquin said, a group is a group and that's that for 99 per cent of the cases.
- There are a few English words (two dozen?) meaning a group of people or things -- clan, band, choir, etc.
- There are also a few more legitimate specialized words for groups of certain kinds of things -- pod of whales, gaggle of geese (which means flying geese, by the way, walking geese are a flock, like most birds).
- Then there was/is a parlor game of making these things up for other groupings -- fanfare of strumpets is my favorite. I just added rush of goldfinches up above in the same spirit.
- Then there are many that are just plain dumb, aanthology of aardvarks, etc.
- Finally there are the inane, that don't even meet the extremely low requirements of this category, such as (culled from above) hail of bullets, coil of stamps, tissue of lies, trail of tears
- The root article here haltingly manifests some awareness of these distinctions, but the collection of links goes to cripplingly overcoded and barely editable list articles that provide almost no guidance in the use of these nouns and are filled with cases marked "spurious", or with worthless, unannotated sublists like brigade of soldiers, company of soldiers, platoon of soldiers, squad of soldiers. Overall this has been a great deal of hard work on someone's part that is not really good encyclopedia material. Compare it to English plural to see how weak it really is. (Yes, I started the plural article, but many many people have contributed to it. It is the only article I regularly worked on that now seems almost complete.) Ortolan88
are there free etymology dictionary?
the question in the article Do there exist any freely accessible dictionaries of etymology on the Web? is moved here.
among collegiate-sized dictionaries, websters, merriem webster, American Heritage, AHD is the most endowed with respect to etynomology.
they are freely avaliable on the web: m-w.com, dictionary.com
PS AHD provides a "notes" section on "collective nouns", see dictionary.com on flock.
Xah P0lyglut 06:23, 2003 Dec 9 (UTC)
It might be worth adding a note to redirect people who are looking for mass noun. On Wiktionary I'm finding people constantly using the term "collective noun" when they are really talking about the idea of "uncountable noun" / "mass noun" / "non-count noun" — Hippietrail 12:35, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
