Collective Nouns

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Hello, I’m teacher Robin, welcome to another livestreaming class. Welcome again to my living room. If you’re just starting to join us, let me tell you that during these days of confinement, I’m recording the videos from my home. So welcome. If you’re new to the live streaming classes, let me tell you how you can participate. If you have a question. As we go along, you can write your question in the comments. And I will answer them later on. So if you have a question about today’s topic, or you just want to say hello, then feel free to write that down. So today’s topic is collective nouns. You might be thinking, what is that? So a collective noun is actually a word used to describe groups of things like a group of different kinds of objects, a group of people, a group of animals. So we’re going to look at some different examples of collective nouns. Today, we’re going to look at people, objects, and finally animals. So I’m going to give you some examples of the most commonly used ones. And hopefully, later, you can write your examples in the comments.

One question that you may have about collective nouns, because it is one word used to describe a group. So do we use the singular or the plural, when we use these collective nouns? It’s a little complicated, but the main rule is that if you are referring to the group as a whole, then we use the singular. So like the verb to be, we would use “is”, for example, and if you are referring to individuals within this group, you would use the plural like “are” if you’re using the verb to be, for example.

So let’s start with some collective nouns describing people. And I want to show you an example of the singular versus plural. So let’s look at the word “class”. A class describes a group of students, okay, so you are participating in a class. Right now you are part of a class because you are one student in a group of many, many students. So for example, if I say “The class visits a museum every May”, I’m talking about the group as a whole. So I use the singular. If I say “The class are writing their essays right now”, this means that each individual person in the group is working on a different essay. So hopefully, that makes it a little bit clearer about whether we use the singular or whether we use the plural.

Let’s look at a few more collective nouns that we use for people. One of them is “party” and I don’t mean like a party you have with your friends, I mean a party to describe two or more people. So normally, if you go to a restaurant, for example, they might ask you “How many people are in your party?” Or you could say, “Can I make a reservation for a party of three?”, for example. Another collective noun is “team”. So this is a group of people, it could be playing a sport. So a baseball team is a collective noun, made up of different players. When we use the collective noun, “police”, we are referring to a group. When we say the police, we’re referring to a group of individual policemen. And the same goes for “army”. So when I say “the army”, for example, I’m talking about individual soldiers.

Now let’s move on to collective nouns for objects. So a few examples of collective nouns for objects, a “pack”. So you can you can refer to a pack when you’re talking about a group of things together. So this could be paper, a “pack of paper”, because there are many sheets of paper in this pack. You could have a “gift pack”, for example. And this includes different items that make up a whole gift. Another collective noun is “pile”. So if you have a pile, it’s many objects on top of each other. So you could say for example, “I have a pile of laundry, dirty laundry, that needs to be washed”. And another example of collective nouns of a collective noun for objects is a “fleet”. So a fleet is actually a group of ships. So when we talk about the military or the Navy, for example, we could say that they have a “fleet of ships”. So this is multiple ships that make up one group.

Now let’s talk about my favorite subject, animals. So we do have many different collective nouns that we use for groups of animals. For example, a group of dogs or a group of wolves is called a “pack”. So you may have also heard this, referring to people when you hear the expression from the song or if you hear in a movie, “the leader of the pack”. This originally comes from animals like a pack of wolves. If someone is the “leader of the pack”, it means that they’re the strongest, they’re the boss or the person that people follow. But the original expression comes from animals like dogs or wolves. Another collective noun for fish, for example, a group of fish is called a “school”. Okay, a group of lions is called a “pride”. A group of owls is called a “parliament”. Okay, so this is a funny one, because we have parliament, which is like the government, but it’s also the name for a group of owls. A group of whales is called a “pod”. And finally, this is my favorite one, a group of crows. So the bird, crows, is called a “murder”. Did you know this? You probably didn’t. It’s a funny one. And it’s not used that often. Maybe in older literature, for example, but it’s a good one to know. A group of crows is called a murder.

So now that you’ve learned about collective nouns and I’ve given you some examples with people, objects, and animals, I want you to write some examples in the comments. So take some different collective nouns and try to write some example sentences, and make sure that you check out everything that we have to offer you. In our course, we have a complete course. We also have our ABA live speaking sessions, and we have our Live English content. So you can watch videos, you can read articles, you can listen to podcasts, we have all kinds of different activities for you to practice your English with us. So check it out, if you haven’t already. And you can follow us on all of the social media networks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. We’re updating those pages every day. So there are so many opportunities for you to learn something new every day, and every week, I will be here teaching you something as well. So again, write your examples in the comments of collective nouns. I hope that this class has been useful for you, I hope that all of you are doing well. Many people are still in confinement, some countries are in the de-confinement process. So the beginning phases of going back to normal. So whatever phase you are in whatever situation that you are in, I hope you’re doing okay. And I hope that you’re making the most of your time to study English and learn something new every day. So take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye.