Karl J Sherlock
Associate Professor, English
Email: karl.sherlock@gcccd.edu
Phone: 619-644-7871
Collective nouns take a singular form but are composed of more than one individual person or item (group, jury, team, class, committee, herd). Often, they are followed by a prepositional phrase specifying what they are composed of: a group of pebbles; a herd of animals.
Collective nouns should not be confused with Mass Nouns. Mass nouns are simply non-count nouns. Collective nouns imply a collective with constituent parts.
Depending on whether you speak and write in the English of the United States, or whether you speak and write the Queen’s English, the rules differ about whether collective nouns are plural or singular. Some collective nouns can be used in both senses. The word, “people, ” is a good example of this:
In the first example, “people” refers to “persons, ” individuals—the constituent parts of a group—and the verb conjugates a plural subject. In the second example, “a people” is the group, and the verb conjugates a singular subject. Adding the definite and indefinite articles (“the, ” and “a/an”) helps to distinguish a collective noun. I’m a bit of a trekkie (or, “trekker, ” for the nerdists out there). If you’re at all familiar with the Star Trek universe, you know what The Borg is, and not “who the Borg are.” The Borg is a collective, with many billions of working individuals assimilated into a single consciousness, also known as a “hive mind.” To become Borg is to become “The Borg” or, simply, to become “Borg, ” but never “a Borg, ” because that would be contradictory to the hive mind identity. If I haven’t completely geeked you out yet, consider that we use this same technique to identify cultural and national identities. We recognize “the world” or “the Earth” as a collective, but within it are other collectives identified by race, religion, tradition, and geographical location. They’re pluralities but they’re not spelled as such. Where we pluralize nationals as “Canadians” and “Ugandans, ” for example, others always begin with the definite article “the” and are written as collectives.
Collective Noun Types
Here are some varieties of collective nouns to help you identify these in your reading and in your own writing. These lists are not comprehensive, just illustrative. (Use your noggin; think of some on your own.)
Nationalities
Nationalities are collectives by nature, but some are identified by singular nouns, not plural:
Country Names
A select number of country names also follow this unusual convention:
Governmental Agencies
Traditionally, words that refer to countries, nationalities, and their governments tend to be collective nouns:
Smaller Geographical Entities
Other geographical locations considered collective nouns when used to denote citizenry:
Corporate Entities
Corporate entities are also considered collective nouns, when used in the right context:
Collaborative Entities
Public agencies are collective nouns when they are used to denote a collaboration of participants or employees:
Gatherings
Groups in which people meet for a collective purpose, whether social or official, are collective nouns. Anywhere numbers of people assemble for a social or political purpose can be added to this list:
Groups Makin’—uhm—Music
Groups characterized by their numbers are collective nouns, including romantic or sexual groups. Collective nouns can even extend to pejorative and slang terms: “love fest, ” “circle jerk, ” “cluster f*ck, ” and so on:
Animal Groups
Some collective nouns refer generally to groups of animals. In taxonomy, these collective nouns are akin to family and genus. When individual species are named by group, we call this a “term of venery” (also called a “noun of assembly”; see below):
While much ado is made over collective nouns in grammar, truthfully, in standard American usage, collective nouns are pretty much the same as other nouns. It’s only when we start to quibble about whether or not to conjugate a plural or singular verb with them that they are contrived to be more complicated than they are. Readers who learned to write and speak English in other countries or as a second language, unfortunately, carry the burden to adjust their thinking about them. Fortunately, unlike so many other rules of American usage, this one simplifies the matter. Enjoy the luxury of that, because many other points of grammar in U.S. American usage do just the opposite.
A large subset of collective nouns are specific to certain kinds of animals. These are called "nouns of assembly" (also known as terms of venery). For example, "pride" as a term of venery refers to lions, but not to dogs. "An exaltation" is used specifically to describe a flock of larks, but not a flock of geese or a group of cats.
Karl J Sherlock
Associate Professor, English
Email: karl.sherlock@gcccd.edu
Phone: 619-644-7871
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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