11 June 2008

Collective Nouns (updated)

I owe this post to Annette, whose story of Panda's and their collective name a pandemonium of Pandas sparked an idea in my mind.

When I was at school, a few years ago than I care to remember, we used to have a test on collective nouns seemingly every week, but then again my memory might be failing.

The Questions would be to fill in the missing gap
  • A ............. of sheep (Flock)
  • A herd of ........... (Cows)
  • A ............. of bees (Swarm)
  • A Pack of .......... (Dogs)
etc.. I enjoyed it at the time, I love challenges like this on words. So here's mine for you to test yourself on, knock yourselves out people - sadly there are no prizes for the right answer but it will be interesting to read your comments.

  1. A Murder of ....Crows...............
  2. A ....Gang......... of Elk
  3. A String of ....Racehorses.....................
  4. A Mob of ......Kangaroos.............
  5. A ....drift ..........of Hogs
  6. A Leap of .....Leopards.....................
  7. A ....Richness ........... of Martens
  8. A Bevy of ..Otters.......................
  9. A ....Span........... of Oxen
  10. A ....Crash.......... of Rhinocerouses
  11. An ...Ambush.......... of Tigers
  12. A Marvel of ...Unicorns..................
Update - have now put the right answers in.. go to the top of the class if you got 8 or more right.. collect the cheats card if you got all 12 as you probably looked them up on the internet.. I know I did ;-)

All are mammals (this time).... maybe my next one will be a different species.

7 comments:

  1. WOW, I was just going to do a post about this myself.
    I have a list of collective nouns off the computer. I was going to print them.You beat me to it!!!
    xxx

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  2. I think I've got some of them:
    1. crows
    2. ?
    3. ponies
    4. people,animals,kangeroos
    5. passel
    6. hares
    7. richness
    8. ?
    9. span
    10. ?
    11. ?
    12. ?

    Got these from my list!!

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  3. I am enjoying this - thanks Annette for giving me the idea as well, perhaps you could do the one on birds or something else?

    Sage

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. I have only found 2 Annette - to your question.

    1) a camp
    2) a languid languish

    and these were the politer ones :-)

    xx

    Sage

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  6. 1. Innocents
    2. Convent
    3. Sausages
    4. Italians
    5. Hooters Bar [of]
    6. Faith healers
    7. House
    8. Beers
    9. Barbershop
    10. Stadium
    11. Ann Summers' night
    12. Ingenuity

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