A Compendium of Collective Nouns – Illustrated

10 September 2014

In Bahasa Indonesia, I don’t think we have a replacements for a group of something, or collective nouns (correct me if I am wrong Indonesian friends). I think we have counter indicators like:
– Setandan pisang = a bunch of bananas
– Sebuku Jari = one part of a finger
– sebidang tanah = a plot of land, etc

I knew some words to replace a group of something in English like a SHOAL of fish or HERD of sheep etc. Plus one of the first tiny exhibition I had encountered at work was lino cut of collective noun for birds, so I knew more now like an Exultation of Larks, a parliament of owls and a murder of crows. By the way the latter is still one of my favourite collective nouns.

But I didn’t realise there is a load more, until I saw this book, A Compendium of Collective Nouns by Woop Studio. I was only looking at it because of cool cover, but end up buying it because it is very useful for me to help me write (and very beautiful too, actually this was the main reason, but I had to justify it somehow, tee hee).

Collective nouns helps to variate writing and make things sounds a bit more poetic, I think.

Here are some of my favourite pages. An Array of Hedgehogs.

A Bouquet of Hummingbirds.

A Huddle of Penguins, such a cute name right?

A Circus of Puffins, they do look a bit like clowns don’t they? With their funny beaks and sad looking eyes.

Not all of the nouns come with a pretty image on this book, also there are a couple that the picture (to me) didn’t depict the beauty of the word like this one is a Kaleidoscope of Butterflies, which is now one of my favourite collective noun.

As you can see the compendium also gives explanation of the origin of the words.

Another cool noun is A Galaxy of Starfish.

Here are more pages that I like, you probably can guess why.

I would mark this book 5 out of 5 for being pretty and informative. 😄

Have you go a favourite collective noun? Or is it just me being a geek, I mean, who likes a noun, right?

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