A murder of crows, a sleuth of bears, a dule of doves, a college of cardinals… uh, no, forget that last one.
How many of these cutsey, semi-clever animal group names (and there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of them) have been around for more than, say, 20 years? And how many have just been written recently by lovers of the English language with too much time on their hands?
My understanding is that coming up with collective nouns was very popular in the Victorian age. Some of my favorites:
One I came up with myself while I was writing a horror story: a shamble of zombies.
Personally, my favorites are a Parliament of Owls and a Grace of Unicorns. The latter I actually first encountered in actual use (i.e., not just in a list of animal collective nouns like this one): The 3rd Edition D&D Monster’s Manual entry for unicorns says that they might be encountered solitary, in pairs, or in a grace (5-7).
Most of them have been around for far more than 20 years (and there are more than a thousand). Hundreds date back more than 500 years, being terms used in venery (hunting). James Lipton compiled many of these from fifteenth century sources (Books of Venery) in his classic work, An Exaltation of Larks. Many others were coined in Victorian times, when it became something of a parlor game to do so.
It’s a great car game, along with Geography, I’m going to X, etc.
Writer James Thurber suggested “A Flare of Strumpets.”
Animal groups were named, often whimsically, in the medieval English “venereal game” played among the hunting classes, which resulted in “terms of venery” or “venereal terms” – collective nouns for animal groups. See generally James Lipton, An Exaltation of Larks (1991). For some lists of venereal collective nouns, see[ul][]Melissa Kaplan, “Beastly Garden of Wordy Delights”;[]Christchurch City Libraries, “Animal Group Names (Collective Nouns)”;[]EnchantedLearning.com, “Names of Males, Females, Babies, and Groups of Animals”;[]Fun With Words, “Collective Nouns”;Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, “Animal Congregations, or What Do You Call a Group of . . . ?”[/ul]
I’m actually partial to a singularity of boars and a sounder of swine. And who’d a thunk you’d need three terms for geese; a skein of geese (in flight), a gaggle of geese (on land) and a plump of geese (on water)?
(although i think there is a bit of artistic licence to be found in wikipedia on that last one…)
Recent coinage:
A Wunch of Bankers
Think about it a little.
Actually, there’s four. Geese are a skein if they’re flying freely and a wedge if they’re flying in v-formation.
A Teeming of Dopers
Cecil is that correct?
They used to be found in the back of dictionaries - I remember looking them up as a child (sadly over 20 years ago!) but I think they have fallen out of favour to some extent - my 1990 Chambers Dictionary seems to have dumped them in favour of ISO paper sizes ! Some are old - a flock or birds, a herd of cows; some have fallen by the wayside as we have become more distanced fomr nature; and some have been coined as recent witticisms. Which is which ? Thinhk how common the noun being ‘collected’ is in current language and there you go.
Since nobody else has: A ______ of herpes?
I think ‘A corps of skeletons’ (walking variety) is in one of the Xanth books. 
They have been around for centuries. However, they were unused for centuries, too.
Lipton (who started the fad) went through ancient documents and listed all he could find, even if the term only appeared in that one document and was never used again. And even if widely used in it’s time, nearly all the terms were out of use by the time Lipton started his research.
It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s highly misleading. It as if I wrote “An arflebarfle of apples” and someone listed that as a collective name. Or if they said, “to occupy” is an obscenity.
About the only “fanciful” term that is still in general use is “a pride of lions.” I believe that this actually post-dates some of the other terms such exaltation of larks.
[Johnny Carson] A shaft of proctologists. [/Johnny Carson]
A fletcher (arrow-maker) with a cubic meter of pre-cut feathers might well carry his stere of flights up a flight of stairs.
Some recent ones:
A formality of penguins.
A dairy of titmice.
An inning of bats.
An aroma of smelt.
A Timken of bears.
A bundle of faggots (from a New York magazine contest.)
A levee of dykes.
A caucus of elephants/donkeys.
A volley of artillery bugs.
Well, there were a good number of such in the olden days. But most of them- especially the really cutesy ones, were made up for the “Game of Venery”, and were never in general use. So, most of the cutesy animal ones were “just been written a hundred years ago by lovers of the English language with too much time on their hands.” But if Lipton hadn’t wrote that silly book, only a few would still be around, with maybe a dozen more lurking in Unabridged Dictionaries.
A caress of breasts.
A clutch of penises.