Collective Nouns
In linguistics, a collective noun is the name of a number (or collection) of people or things taken together and spoken of as one whole. For example, in the phrase "a pride of lions", pride is a collective noun.
Most collective nouns encountered in everyday speech, such as "group", are mundane and are not specific to one kind of constituent object. For example, the terms "group of people", "group of dogs", and "group of ideas" are all correct uses. Others, especially words belonging to the large subset of collective nouns known as terms of venery (words for groups of animals), are specific to one kind of constituent object. For example, "pride" as a term of venery refers to lions, but not to dogs or cows.
Collective nouns should not be confused with mass nouns, or with the collective grammatical number.
Read more about Collective Nouns: Derivational Collectives, Metonymic Merging of Grammatical Number, Terms of Venery (words For Groups of Animals)
Famous quotes containing the words collective and/or nouns:
“The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live—he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)