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In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. [1] For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones").
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
2 Minyan. 1 comment. 3 Vampires. 2 comments. 4 Continuing clean-up. 3 comments. 5 36 Puns Removed. 1 comment. 6 Typo for Spiders. ... Talk: List of collective nouns ...
A 1930s Works Progress Administration poster depicts a man with WPA shovel attacking a wolf labeled 'rumor'.. A rumor (American English), or rumour (British English; see spelling differences; derived from Latin rumorem 'noise'), is an unverified piece of information circulating among people, especially without solid evidence.
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...
Painting(s) in [1]–[4] are unambiguously nouns. Paintings in [1] and [2] feature the plural -s morpheme associated with nouns and also head phrases containing determinatives (i.e., some and Brown's), a feature also observed in [3]–[5]. Painting in [4] is also modified by an adjective phrase (deft), further suggesting that it is a noun. [58]
Could someone whose opinion of collective nouns is slightly more NPOV than my personal burning hatred point out in the intro to the article that collective nouns are not a fixed construction of the English language -- one can refer to a group of any sort of thing as just that, a "group", or indeed mix and match in any way one sees fit.
Grammatical number is typically marked on nouns in English, and present-tense verbs show agreement with the subject. But there are cases of mismatch, such as with a singular collective noun as the subject and plural agreement on the verb (e.g., The team are working hard).