Nouns (Collective) 01

Collective nouns signify groups, such as "team", "group", "orchestra" or "herd".

How many different types of noun do you know? Collective nouns can be fun. You can have a "litter" of kittens, a "herd" of elephants, and a "convocation" of eagles. And did you know that a group of crows is called a "murder"? Spooky!

Collective nouns can be a little bit troublesome grammatically. Remember that even though a sentence might be referring to many people or animals, the collective noun, or name of the group, is singular. So it would not be correct to say "the herd of elephants flatten the grass" because "herd" is singular. One way to test this is to remove the plural element, like this: "the herd flattens the grass". Here, you can see that "flattens" is the correct form of the verb, rather than "flatten". Likewise: "the orchestra plays", "the team wins again" and "the group succeeds".

See how much you have learned in your classes by playing the following quiz about collective nouns.