Monday, November 17, 2014

COLLECTIVE NOUNS

In linguistics, a collective noun is a collection of things taken as a whole. For example, in the phrase "a pride of lions", pride is a collective noun.
Most collective nouns in everyday speech for example , such as "group", are mundane and are not specific to a kind of object. For example, the terms "group of people", "group of dogs", and "group of ideas" are all correct uses. Others, especially words belonging to the large subset of collective nouns known as terms of venery (words for groups of animals), are specific to one kind of constituent object. For example, "pride" as a term of venery refers to lions, but not to dogs or cows.

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