Collective Nouns Project | Words In Motion
Saint Albans And His Never Thriving Jugglers
And A Rabble Of Bees.
Published in
3 min readSep 1, 2020
The Collective Nouns Project is the brainchild of Karen Madej.
She invites us to select collective nouns that spark joy and write about them.
A collective noun refers to a group of people or things. We use some of them every day. Examples of common collective nouns are a gaggle of geese or a herd of elk.
Most people have heard of a murder of crows, though we don’t use the phrase much in day to day life.
‘There’s a murder of crows going after the baby robins in the garden!’
They can sometimes be surprising. Here are some fun ones I discovered in Karen’s article.
- a garrison of gophers (I see them all lined up in their foxholes.)
- a number of mathematicians (no other word would do)
Never-thriving jugglers was another one.
I confess, I’m a bit of an etymology nerd, so I had to look that one up.
