In Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series, a nest of vampires is called a seethe. Is this her invention or is that term used elsewhere.
None of the online dictionaries I have checked show anything close to a definition that fits that usage.
I vote for her own concoction…
Makes me think of Fritz Leiber coining “A tower of waterspouts.”
Sure sounds like a new coinage…but, damn, it’s a pretty one!
Are there any official “rules” on this kind of thing? If I want to say “A pustule of zombies,” is there a department of the grammar police that will issue an APB?
I’ve heard “nest”, “den”, “gang”, “tribe”,“clan”, and “coven” used, but this is the first time I have heard of “seethe”.
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
It’s obviously a teethe of vampires.
One dracule?
That sounds more like a single unit than a collective term. The unit you use when you count Draculas.
Does drachma have a shot here?
I’ve also seen “kiss” and “hive”.
A small gathering of vampires is a bite.
A large gathering of vampires is a megabite.
A Google Books search is only coming up with Patricia Briggs novels and a couple of fantasy anthologies, presumably ones featuring stories by Briggs.
The OED does recognize “seethe” as a noun (“Seething, ebullition (of waves); intense commotion or heat”), although not as a collective noun. Personally I don’t think “seethe” is a great term for a group of vampires due to the association with heat/boiling. I assume that Briggs means to suggest that the vampires are angry, chaotic, or vicious, but since vampires are traditionally depicted as being cold I’d have gone with something else.
Bumping this because I just came across this reference (I still prefer “seethe” rather than “basement” for vampires, though). I like “rally of hobgoblins,” and the ones in the lower right corner are pretty funny.
A wing of vampires.
I’ve never seen “seethe” used for vampires. I do recall a throwaway reference in a P.C. Hodgell novel to a “seething of eels”, which I thought a rather nifty coinage, but no other variations on the word used as a collective noun. I’d say Briggs made this one up, and I’m not too impressed with it.
I prefer Jim Butcher’s choice of “scourge” as a collective noun for his Black Court vampires.
Call it what you want, but that’s a rot of zombies.
I guess it wouldn’t be the worst term for fruity Twilight-style vamps. But if I were a vampire, I think that I would go out of my way to snack on people who used it.
I love you and want to eat your brains!
(“Every little breeze seems to whisper disease…”)
I figured it’d be a brace of vampires.