A pair of crows actually. A crow is just a crow (or possibly a manslaughter). Two crows are an attempted murder and three crows or more are a murder. 😁

No one crow innocent.

This brings to mind that old country saying, "see one rook by 'is self, he be a crow; see a flock of crows, they be rooks". Which suggests a murder of crows is an oxymoron (except during the mating season).

A suicide risk perhaps?

Attempted murder - as shown in the video at 12:43

😂🤣😅 I love it

This is freaking adorable

@@anastasiafalcon4637 we dont eat þe ferrets falcon.🤣👍

So. one ferret would be a sole proprietorship?

@@CAMacKenzie honestly either way it's more like a busyness than a business

That is truly amazing and clever 😂 thanks for sharing!

as valid a collection as a pride of lions or a coven of witches. good work, well done.

how about a fine of ticket inspectors?

A sweeping of janitors and a wrenching of maintenance workers

Anger of Arabs?

A notable book by James Lipton (known for Actors' Studio) that should have been mentioned in this video even if it wasn't used as source.

A sassafras of vermillion

I just had to reply because you have the same name as me. Is the collective noun of lesbians a lick? Or was someone just pulling my leg.

I didn't catch up that one when I was watching the series! The writers are truly geniuses

A handful of wankers.

😅

Thanks for the tip

Here in germany the most absent employes are the staff of hardware stores😂

Yes and on the water, they are called a "raft."

As a Zimbabwean, I have too.

That is the formal English term for a group of Rhinos.

Motswana here, same.

For what it's worth, though I'm not from a place with enough to say myself, I heard it used ages ago. Before any of this make-up-your-own got popular

The crash or the term? Haha

A giggle of girls is cute and clever.

Your son needs a better hobby.

too funny

That's very cute, actually 😅

Since boys tend to be a bit nervous around girls, one might call a group a bumbling of boys.

The medieval manuscript has Exalting of Larks.

Are they indeed suggesting "singularity" to denote a multitude of something? So weird! Or is it suggesting that boars are so compact that when they meet, they create a black hole?

I think it's because boors are alone as much as others can help it. 🤣@@mumiemonstret

W mom

One of my Facebook posts during the pandemic was the obscure "Corvid - Conspiracy or Murder". Few people got the joke.

They can also be known as an Unkindness Both are correct :)

I saw a comic strip that called a group of lawyers a "conspiracy." :>)

@@brucestiles6477 I thought that was a bunch of sharks? Or was I thinking about bankers? But what I do know is a Congress of Salamanders is very funny.

I like an embarrassment of pandas

How about a graffiti of zebras?

Those are beautiful!

Oh my! I had never heard "kaleidoscope of butterflies"! How delightful!

@@DalokiMauvais It is, rather, isn't it. :D

A parliament that gives wise advice AND keeps the rodent population in check? When C.S. Lewis dreamed, he dreamed big!

A fun side fact: I just recently learned it was also a nod to Chaucer's A Parliament of Foules. LOL. I'm 52 and have read and been in love with Lewis and Narnia since childhood. I still read them on occasion and it's funny how certain things in everyday life trigger memory of chapter titles or quotes from one of the books. It's so cool to see you mentioned that chapter because it's one of my very favorites in the series. 🤓🥰

The owl is a prominent feature in the ruling-classes' symbolism. Bohemian Grove has a 30-foot statue of an owl in its grounds.

Could be the origin of The Court of Owls, from Batman comics 🤔

@@klaus_poppe IIRC, that was revealed to be one subset of the Larger [Parliament of Owls] that is basically DC's Illuminati.

That's lovely 😂

The "coughin of smokers" is phenomenal! :D

Askegels (ash cones) is the name I use in Dutch. That’s what we call a smoked/burned part of a cigarette or cigar. And ‘kegel’ can mean cone but can also mean a bowling pin. And they’re often smoking at the entrance of a building at the end of an entranceway like a bowling alley.

Coffin is the best, most interesting one.

Depends on what they're smoking, though. If it's marijuana, I'd say it's more "a haze of the dazed".

Awesome

Nice.

Spot on 😂😂😂

That reminded me of Norm MacDonald's appearance on Conan O'Brien's show, when he hilariously told the awful joke about "serving a youthful porpoise."

I like those little jokes and puns he sneaks in. But sometimes I wonder if I missed any. I'll try not to overthink it.

Yep, that one almost flew under the radar, he kept a perfectly straight face. Any bloopers?

A nod to Lewis Carroll’s Gryphon and Mock Turtle

A book of collective nouns I read a few years back had "a blush of boys."

Amen!

My Cornish grandfather referred to his four daughters as "a giggle of girls" in the 1940's.

Apparently this is very old, 16th century if not 15th, but was originally "a giggle of boys". Culture changes I guess.

It's actually a bevy of girls

Perfect

It is.

enjoy the Inspector Morse radioplays

Love Morse! English/grammar lessons and a murder all in one! John Thaw was the best!

why wouldn't that be a cut?

Penny Arcade came up with a blessing of unicorns, I think.

@@jjkrayenhagen I don't think PA came up with it, or at least I haven't found anything citing them as the source. On a side note: Google tells me a group of unicorns can also be called a glory or a marvel.

@@RelativelyBest I thought that one of their articles said that they came up with it in one of their discussions, but maybe they just mentioned hearing it.

I would argue that it should be 'An Angst of Emo' and 'A Skulk of Goths' :P

Ed Byrne says it a Mood Of Goths and an Isobar of Emos, they being linked by their depression

A courtesy of Canadians?

You could also have a Miracle of Penguins for when they are in flight. 🤪

@@PLuMUK54 Lol, well done 👏

I've heard waddle before but also a panache of penguins.

@@PLuMUK54penguins fly? Only under water as far as I know.

@@lorraineliggera4229 That's why you would call it a "miracle" ;-)

Yeah that was my interpretation aswell. Maybe they weren't at the time and we just see it like that now but I always thought that was what it was referring to.

So did I

I think that's still the same explanation; crows were perceived as a sign of ill omen because they hang out around dead bodies and make (what are to us) ominous shrieking sounds

I wonder if the word was resurrected by the movie “The Birds” by Alfred Hitchcock. I have a vague memory of learning the word in association with that movie, but can’t remember if it was ever used in the movie.

@@margaretford1011 Possibly popularized it. That's a Hitchcock I sadly haven't seen yet, I should get on that!

I took the opposite view and thought perhaps the author was having a laugh by coining "mute of hounds" because if you've ever heard a group of hounds they are the exact opposite of mute!

That would surely be a misspelling of or possibly pun on hustings a meeting at which candidates in an election address potential voters. Originally referring to a governing assembly in Germanic.

@@franohmsford7548 that's cool I did not know that! I think it had more to do with the Battle of Hastings though, which took place in 1066.

@@Branwhin As I said....It may have been a double pun with the number of people there making the change from Hustings to Hastings an easy and obvious malaprop.

Lol, that's interesting, didn't know that.

Funnily enough in the British Army, officers are often referred to as crows as a bit of a pejorative. When in training we'd give the officer in charge the big, heavy LSW rifle; affectionately called the "crow cannon."

Actually, a group of Karens is called a Homeowners Association.

How about a sorry of Canadians?

A drunk of Irish!!!

@@andresfontalvo17 That's cute, and harsh.

A tangle of octopi? An extinction of dinosaurs? A parliament of idiots? A stagger of drunks or a vomit of drunks? A whining of millennials? A pile up of cars? A rusting of cars where I live. A grating of cell phones? Their constant ringing, dinging and buzzing quickly start grating on my nerves, maybe because no one ever calls me. A singling of loners? Only seen at comic conventions or Magic the Gathering tournaments. Maybe a stink of nerds?

None of those can surpass "A Confusion of Philosophers". That's my favorite one.

Sound like they were a Misanthrope of Dons.

@@southcoastpauly now, not then.

Oh, very good 😄

I thought a "shoal" was also an area of shallower water near the coast that ships could still travel through. As in the Pirates of the Caribbean 2 "we are shallow on the draft, can't see lose them along the shoal?" Or is the word incorrect? I'm not a nautical person but my first thought upon hearing the word shoal was water depth not fish.

@naomilangevin3944 that is another use of the word also. Good call

​@@naomilangevin3944I'm from savannah GA with some time spent in the florida keys and breifly in the gulf of mexico and that's the only way I've ever heard it used. There could be several schools of fish or fishes( the double plural for multiple kinds of fish that is rarely used outside of biblical quotations or marine biologists but could be used at any fish market) but they were described as swimming or otherwise residing in the shoals or in "that shoal over there" as someone pointed to a distinct area that followed a line. I was never instructed as to what designated the ending of one shoal and the beginning of another but it always seemed intuitive with darkening waters and bigger individual fish species frequenting those areas and far fewer smaller or more numerous species. Like the space between galaxies or a dark region where few galaxies exist or within a galaxy where few star systems exist but which isn't obscured by a dust cloud. "The shoals" was an area you could explore and was populated by schools and individual marine species.

It was never defined to me, but often used. I suppose it could've been in reference to the loose groupings of fish who occupied those regions, but I remember being warned about getting a water craft stuck in those regions on several occasions or damaging a keel. A fin keel, was also just called a keel. With fiberglass and inflated or semi ridged hulls which never possessed a real keel from stem to stern as well as the metal bottom and even modern wooden vessels with a shallow keel simply referred to as the hull or bottom of the hull. The only time that the word "keel" was imidiatly followed by the word "fin" was on the caudal peduncle of a fish at the 4H marine center, which the children would imidiatly laugh at when pronounced.

An imagination of hermits.

I’d say that lands perfectly between phonetics, exoticism & exaggerated warning

I wonder if it was coined for multiple leopards in a heraldic achievement?

@@jgw5491 A heraldic achievement would be the entirety of all the components a bearer of a coat of arms is entitled to (supporters, motto, helmet, mantling etc). I'm not aware of leopards being displayed anywhere outside of a heraldic charge. To the best of my knowledge, three is the maximum of leopards displayed in any coat of arms (and they usually look more or less the same like a heraldic lion because, frankly, medieval Europeans had no clue what they looked like) and heraldry tries to be precise when describing any given coat of arms. For instance, the famous English three lions where, in heraldry, originally called leopards (which was more of a description for a pose). So, the royal British arms would be Gules, three lions passant guardant in pale Or armed and langued Azure -> On a red field, three golden lions walking in the "Dexter" position looking towards the viewers with a blue tongue. TLDR: Heraldry does not use collective nouns for a charge, it would say "2 leopards" or "3 fish" or "5 geese"

and blue claws. That's the "armed". @@timolynch149

And thanks for all the fish!

Came here to say this 👏🏼

I dolphinately enjoyed that pun too.

Yes his was perfect. I tried to slip it in once in a conversation and received a lot of side-eyed views.

Literally going through the comments to see if anyone else noticed 👏🏽

Yes, and when speaking of a skein of geese, it’s fun to advise that geese assemble into these formations to benefit from the aerodynamic efficiency it provides, and then ask why one side of the skein is longer than the other and pause while the scientific possibilities are considered...the answer? There’s more geese on that side...

@@Dbsabzbzb One of my favorite jokes - and you beat me to it! lol! 🤣

I wonder how it is connected with a skein of wool, wool wound in a loop before it is wound into a ball.

A group of geese floating on water is called a plump.

It's because geese skein up to get high. :D

That title is much more clever than the band’s music, which I had completely forgotten about.

FLUFF ❤

Did you use the book "First Aid in English"? It was a splendid schoolbook, which our primary school relied on hugely for such delights as these collective words. I haven't seen a copy of it anywhere in decades.

Sounds like you had a fabulous teacher!

I think it may derive from one of the 18th century British philosophers who wrote an essay about the ideal state being like a beehive with all the bees selflessly devoted to their king, ultimately producing sweetness and light, i.e. honey and beeswax for candles. A commonwealth of bees. Of course, they didn't know that the king bee is actually female, and the other bees are sterile females who cluster around her to feed her and carry off her eggs. I actually read this royalist essay long ago, and was pleased to see the origin of the phrase sweetness and light, although it's usually used ironically now.

@@b.a.erlebacher1139 Very interesting, thanks for that insight!

The word commonwealth reminds me of a group of countries.

Psst... Onomatopoeia, pronounced ah-nuh-mah-tuh-PEE-uh, refers to the practice of naming something based on a phonetic (spoken) imitation of a sound associated with it. It can also refer to a single word of this kind: Hiss is an onomatopoeia. Buzz, chirp, and honk are all also examples of onomatopoeia.

Okay, I have to give credit to the late, great Terry Pratchett for this one who gave us the Argument of Witches.

Shortage of Dwarves

Ive heard legion of demons quite often, and honestly, an industry of villains fit well.

A Rattle of Bones.

"British English" I would assume.

It works for the people or the language, if you'd like to refer to a grouping of words.

A plummet of airplanes, lol

Plummet of Airplanes? Too soon man, too soon. 9/11 Never Forget!

In the days of IRC, the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.dragons spread there as AFD, and coined "a Dominance of Dragons" (with caps, because dragons are prideful ;)

Stephen King calls it a Bonfire of Dragons.

At my Gaming Table (D&D or GURPS usually) it would deteriorate to a "Hilarity of Dragons" at this point... AND it's probably my fault... In a "one-shot-turned-campaign", sometime back, I was reaching a low-energy point and someone complained that we hadn't (as a group) faced any dragons... Now, granted, we had several relative noob's in the group and some veterans of our collective had "retired" (basically moved and life got in the way)... so it was a sort of new group, but it had also been quite a while since we had faced dragons, even for the remaining veterans of the game at the Table... SO I started working in an adventure direction toward that... At some point, memories of my mother crept in, and particularly a conversation (she was a fantasy novel FIEND) where we discussed the actual ramifications of "what if dragons WERE real"... AND hit upon the prospect of just leaving the car wash... and you think bird-sh*t is disheartening! SO in a town carved right out of the rocks of mountainsides and cliffs, I narrated and described a few free-standing buildings, all of which seemed at least 3 to 5 TIMES as durable as any the Party had seen... There were signs of course, "beware dragons" and the like... Everything outdoors was WAY over-engineered for what you'd expect... AND the livery in town even had a system for self service in the case the shop keep or night watch wasn't immediately present, so customers could let themselves in and park wagons without requisite aid, a place to write and sign notes, and the like... BUT of course, they parked the wagon and horses right outside the bar, and even ignored the warnings from a couple street kids and a woman who could easily tell they "weren't from anywhere around here"... AND of course, a few minutes in the tavern later, there was a horrendous crash outside, the screaming of horses and a commotion... and the Party came out to see the immense pile of dung slumping in the middle of the remains of their wagon, with the horses bolting down the street... because I couldn't get the idea out of my head... and it was too funny to resist... SO ever since that little adventure (which they played out and even survived relatively the worse for the wear, but not hopelessly so) the merest mention of dragons at our Table results in a roll of giggles and mutters building up to hilarity as the story is retold to whomever "was noob' enough to look for that kind of trouble" at least at our Table... ;o)

I think that came from the Inheritance Cycle

I've read "an inferno of dragons" though they were at that moment in the story attacking a town with fire. "A blaze of dragons" would also be a good short hand, perhaps used by members of a more rural community in a fantasy setting.

Hostler or ostler. I'd only previously encountered the second spelling, but apparently the two are about as common as each other.

@@petertaylor4980 Interesting! I've only encountered "ostler" in literature. According to a quick Google search, it seems that "ostler" is the common British spelling and "hostler" the American. This is odd because I'm Canadian, and we usually favour the British spelling of things (or, occasionally, the French spelling, for the sake of saving money on road signs).

Kettle is generally used at least in the USA for a group of birds, generally vultures and/or other birds of prey soaring and circling in a thermal.

I’ve definitely heard/read that many times over the years, myself.

Which emphasizes that it's a game! And has stunning illustrations... Pride of place on my shelf!

It s fascinating!

By James Lipton.

For clarity, collective words in English are not those wonderful collections of words all stuck together that make German such a joy. Bärenhunger is NOT a multiplicity of bears and Affendurst is not a multiplicity of apes and as far as I know the Delfinschule is where you learn to swim. Rather a fun posting nonetheless!

Dolphin school or whale school are used in German. But more likely for a group of moms and kids

...or whales as well.

In Donald Duck, years ago, I saw Affenhitze.

Are you not confusing collective nouns (a gaggle of geese/Gänseschar) with compund nouns (Windmill/Windmühle)? As far as I am awarre there are only few collective nouns in German as the same word e.g. Schar is used for a large number fo different animals.

Love it!

@@wordreet It's not often that I come up with an acknowledged witticism, so I am going to take some time and savor it! Thank You!

@@samTollefson Please be careful though. Leaving stuff cooking overnight is not without risks. Hopefully you have a smoke alarm in the ceiling nearby. Our local Fire Service people installed three in various places in the house just a few months ago. I had one for ages, but with no battery in it!

@@wordreet No worries, I run the pots at about 210 degrees until I go to sleep then turn them off with the covers on until the morning when I bring them back up to 180 or so before shutting them down, cooling and bagging them for freezing. I have been doing this for 30+ years with no problems, and have enjoyed a few thousand delicious low-effort weekday meals! Thanks for your concern!

@@samTollefson Cool bananas! No, wait! Hot bananas! No! Wait! . . . 😕

it is a flocculating agent; well known to chemists

Dave Taylor, yes, I heard that and my brain went BOING…! Too early in the morning for puns🤪

I caught that, too. I had to back it up and listen again with CC on. Rob is a punny guy.

In English, we have a "sounder" of hogs, and hunters still use that.

The Italian "muta di cani" sounds incredibly similar to "mute of hounds", and it means the same thing.

@Rijjhb in french too "une meute de chiens"

"Enjambre de abejas" literally "swarm/crowd of bees". I'm feeling this could easily translate into English as "A jamboree of bees" which sounds quite jolly.

@@copacopa4881 the funny thing is that I have no idea of what "muta" means in that context. Do you happen to know what "meute" means in French?

Nonsense of husbands!

​@@deirdre8744 It's creative and funny.

Great idea!

Yesss

I agree!

Romanians say that the ducks go 'mac, mac' which curiously is also their word for poppy.

This is a great idea!

I think that's the book I used to have -- my favorite collective noun has always been "an exaltation of larks." 😊

So you're a lion? :-P Well, reading your comment here could give her a hint.

Lol... "Hard lover" is an interesting twist on "tough love". English is crazy.

Les mots collectifs ne sont pas très utiles, mais je pense qu'ils sont fascinants! _"Murder"!?_ o_O Pourquoi!? C'est complètement fou!

@@Tmanaz480 I was going to make the same comment :)

I feel second-hand vindication for you :) I hope she does remember when you tell her ❤

Likewise for me with "a crash of rhinos"

Whether etymologically sound or created out of thin air, repetition begets commonality begets thus being "real" words. Just ask "normalcy" - appropriated from math(s) by US prez Warren G. Harding as a neologistic synonym for "normality" - or the personally devastating "should of."

Multiple occasions? So you’re saying it’s “business” as usual?

Must be a ferret owner thing - had a friend who owned 2 - said if he had one more he would have a business of ferrets (first time I heard the term) .... we joked for a while on how the two ferrets were already into all his 'business' ...

A mullet is the collective term for a group of weasel fighters

Leopards? I never heard that before - or are you joking? There are various versions out there that switch around the last 3 or 4 groups, but the one I learned has "Eleven pipers piping" and "Ten lords a-leaping."