![]() ![]() Some were suggested several times over, indicating that they were in favour, but Bruce decided that none were commonly used. ![]() He received a swag of suggestions, including the lovely carolling of currawongs, and awarded a prize for the now somewhat dated chatroom of galahs (perhaps a ‘twitter’ is now more apt). Others are just plain bizarre, such as a smack of jellyfish.Īlmost a decade ago, Bruce Moore, former director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre in Canberra, went on a search to find widely used and quintessentially Australian examples. The collective noun highlights the fact that there’s more than one snake in the group. When someone refers to a snake den, the word den is used as a collective noun. A collective noun that describes a group of animals is also known as a term of venery. What’s a Group of Snakes Called A group is called a snake den or pit. Owls are usually found singly or in pairs rather than in large groups. A collective noun is used to describe a group or collection of things as a whole. One that doesn’t seem to fit is a parliament of owls. The main objective of using collective nouns is to simplify communication and description. Even an unkindness of ravens was originally related to their supposed habit of turfing chicks out of nests. A collective noun is one word that represents a group of animals, people, or things. Sue says many traditional collective nouns incorporate a characteristic of the animal’s behaviour, such as a pride of lions or a cloud of gnats. “But the way mob is used by indigenous groups for themselves is peculiar to Australia.” “A mob is an untidy collection, whereas a pack is much more orderly,” Sue says. Dingoes became a pack of wild dogs, and one term that we like to think is Australian, a mob of kangaroos (also applied to sheep and cattle), is used elsewhere in the world for other groups of animals. Rather than Australians developing their own collective nouns, they just applied conventional terms to the new area and new groups of animals, says Sue Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary. “By and large they’re falling out of use.” Best collective nouns ![]() “Young squires and knights wanting to learn hunting had to learn a whole range of terms, such as a brace of deer or grouse,” he says. Roly Sussex, Emeritus Professor of Applied Language studies at the University of Queensland, says they were used by those wishing to boost their social status. Many of these were for groups of animals, and some are still in use today, such as a gaggle of geese. The book about ‘gentlemen’s interests’ became popular, and the terms widely accepted as correct English. ![]()
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