Collective Nouns

I have long been fascinated by English collective nouns. They give a name to groups of or things, like a flock of birds, flock is the collective noun and birds are the individual things in that group. Usually, but not always, the noun is singular. I’ll talk about that in another post.

English has collective nouns for many things, here are some common ones:

Team (of players)

Orchestra (of musicians)

Herd (of cows)

School (of fish)

I find them interesting because there are some very unexpected ones:

Gaggle (of geese, on the ground)

Skein (of geese, in flight)

Pride (of lions)

Ambush (of tigers)

and of course a Bench (of Bishops)

Often it seems obvious why the word came into common use, a pride of lions is just that, but why a school of fish?