Collective nouns

In linguistics, a collective noun is a word that refers to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are mundane and do not identify just one specific kind, such as the word "group", which may apply to "people" in the phrase "a group of people" but may also correctly refer to "dogs", in the phrase "a group of dogs". Other collective nouns are specific to one kind, especially terms of venery, which are words for specific groups of animals. For example, "pride" as a term of venery always refers to lions, never to dogs or cows.

Morphological derivation accounts for many collective words and various languages have common affixes for denoting collective nouns; the English endings -age and -ade often signify a collective.

Forms of English handle verb agreement with collective count nouns differently; in particular, in British English it is generally accepted that collective nouns can take either singular or plural verb forms depending on the context and the metonymic shift that it implies

A collective noun is a word that refers to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are mundane and do not identify just one specific kind, such as the word "group", which may apply to "people" in the phrase "a group of people" but may also correctly refer to "dogs", in the phrase "a group of dogs". Other collective nouns are specific to one kind, especially words for groups of specific animals. For example, "pride" is a collective noun that always refers to lions, never to dogs or cows.

Morphological derivation accounts for many collective words. Because derivation is a slower and less productive word formation process than the more overtly syntactical morphological methods, there are fewer collectives formed this way. As with all derived words, derivational collectives often differ semantically from the original words, acquiring new connotations and even new denotations.

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