Last night I was helping Becca with her homework and learned that a group of Penguins is called a Colony. I got to thinking about some of the other names like a murder of crows and a pod of dolphins. I remembered that last week I had seen a group of tigers called something cool but I couldn’t remember what it was so I looked it up.
Did you know that we have a different collective name for almost every animal? I was amazed at some of them, so, now I share some of the cooler ones with you. I’m leaving out a lot of them because there are so many. I’m also leaving out some of the standards like school of fish or flock of birds. A group of Ants can be called a Nest, Army, Swarm, Colony or Bike. I’m leaving out nest, army swarm and colony because we already know them. I didn’t know what a bike of ants was.
BTW, a group of tigers is called an ambush (or streak). Pretty cool huh?
Apes : Shrewdness
Bears : Sloth or Sleuth
Bats : Cloud
Boars : Singular (Isn’t that defeating the purpose?)
Bobolinks : Chain
Buzzards : Wake
Cobras : Quiver
Cockroaches : Intrusion
Cows : Kine (Yeah, I thought ‘Herd’ too)
Crocodiles : Float
Eagles : Convocation
Elephants : Memory
Ferrets : Business
Flamingos : Stand
Foxes : Skulk
Frogs : Knot
Giraffes : Tower
Gnus : Implausibility
Grasshoppers : Cluster
Goats : Trip
Housecats : Nuisance (I swear! I read this in several places.)
Jellyfish : Smack
Lice : Flock
Owls : Parliament or Stare
Peacocks : Ostentation
Pheasants (when in flight) : Bouquet
Ponies : String (A string of poloponies)
Raccoons : Gaze
Rattlesnakes : Rhumba
Ravens : Unkindness
Rhinoceros : Crash
Sharks : Shiver
Wild Cats : Destruction
Wombats : Wisdom
Woodpeckers : Descent
I saw a lot of other cool names but I only saw them listed in one place so I didn’t want to believe them. Everything listed above was found in at least three different places including one [.gov website] so I’ll believe them but… a stand of flamingos? a memory of elephants? Who makes these things up?
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