Whats the Word When Refering to One Family but Multiple Members
Often, nosotros find ourselves every bit members of groups. Nosotros might be a member of a family, a team, a order, or a club. Non only exercise all of these things prevent us from existence lonely, simply the words used to refer to them are all nouns.
We use nouns to refer to friendly people, interesting places, and astonishing things, and we utilise many different types of nouns in our writing in speech. Right now, we're going to gather everybody together and explore a type of noun that we use to refer to groups, gaggles, and gangs: the commonage noun.
What is a collective noun?
The give-and-take collective ways "of or feature of a grouping of individuals taken together." A collective noun is a noun that appears singular in formal shape just denotes a group of persons or objects. The words regular army, flock, and bunch are all examples of commonage nouns. These nouns are all singular nouns but they refer to a group of people or things. In almost cases, collective nouns utilise atypical verbs. That's becausecommonage nouns refer to a group of multiple people or things as a single unit or entity.
Collective nouns vs. uncountable (mass) nouns
Although collective nouns are very similar to uncountable nouns, there are of import differences between the 2 types of nouns. Unlike uncountable nouns, collective nouns can follow an indefinite article or a number: y'all can buy a deck of cards merely you tin can't buy "a furniture." Another major difference is that commonage nouns typically have plural forms while uncountable nouns rarely do. For example, a baseball game game can be betwixt two teams but you lot don't put "three milks" in your coffee.
Are commonage nouns singular or plural?
In nearly cases, collective nouns use singular verbs equally in My family is weird. If the collective noun is made plural, information technology uses a plural verb every bit in The two families hate each other. So far and so proficient. Still, if the members of the grouping are not interim in unison, it sounds better to use a plural verb.
Take a await at these two sentences, and you can run into when we would desire to utilise a plural verb:
- The flock is grazing quietly in the meadow.
- Whenever the wolves appear, the flock run in every direction.
If you don't understand the divergence, try reading the sentences once more and analyze the context of what each sentence is trying to say. In the starting time judgement, every sheep in the flock is doing the aforementioned thing: they are all acting as a harmonious unit as they swallow grass. In the second judgement, the sheep are panicking, and information technology is every sheep for themself as they run away. If the second sentence instead used a singular substantive, the sentence would mean that the sheep all collectively ran in the same direction.
Although information technology makes sense to use a plural verb in this case, it even so sounds awkward to virtually people. For this reason, writers will frequently write a sentence in such a way that they avert using a plural verb with a collective substantive. For case, it may feel better to say The members of the jury fence with 1 another rather than The jury contend with one some other.
Three types of collective nouns and examples
We use collective nouns to refer to a wide diversity of stuff.
People
Nosotros often use collective nouns to refer to groups of people.
- Examples: squad, gang, squad, regular army, jury, clergy, cult, crew
Animals
There are a lot of different commonage nouns that refer to groups of animals. Many of these collective nouns are memorable because of how silly or strange they sound.
- Examples: a herd of cows, a litter of kittens, a pride of lions, a school of fish, a murder of crows, a clowder of cats, a clan of hyenas, a flamboyance (yes, really!) of flamingos
Things
We also employ collective nouns to refer to groups of things. Depending on the word, a collective noun can refer to a group of physical objects and/or abstract ideas.
- Examples: agglomeration, stack, pile, supply, set, pack, collection, trove, horde
List of collective nouns
We utilize many collective nouns in everyday spoken communication. Take a look at this list of collective nouns and see if yous tin call back of things you could utilise these words to refer to.
- heap, bushel, sheaf, quiver, bundle, choir, troupe, posse, mob, class, herd, swarm, staff, battalion, ring, colony, pair, packet, wad, fleet, commission, congregation, ensemble, tribe, troop
The deviation between collective & compound nouns
Then far, nosotros have focused simply on commonage nouns. There is another blazon of noun that likes to bring things together. A compound substantive is a noun that is formed from ii or more words.
Chemical compound nouns are more versatile than collective nouns and can refer to a unmarried person or a single object. By contrast, collective nouns must refer to more than one person or thing even when used as a singular noun.
Looking for more? Add together on to your knowledge about compound nouns with our article on them!
Too this difference, both collective nouns and compound nouns follow the same rules that govern all other nouns. Both can be atypical nouns or plural nouns. Both can exist concrete nouns or abstruse nouns. Both can be possessive nouns: for instance, you can visit your sister-in-law's business firm or hear the jury's decision. Possessive collective nouns can exist tricky considering they imply that the entire grouping owns or contributes to something. If this isn't true, you may need to rethink your sentence and replace the collective noun with a more accurate word.
Although rare, it is possible for a substantive to be both a collective noun and a compound substantive. For example, the word homeroom is a compound noun formed from the words home and room. At the same time, homeroom can be used as a collective noun to refer to a grouping of students.
Let's finish with a review of everything yous accept learned. Look at each of the following sentences and see if you can sympathise why the given noun is a collective noun, a compound noun, or both.
- She was carrying a stack of books.
- I really don't think he is a people person.
- We saw a flash mob past metropolis hall.
- My blood brother is allergic to seafood.
- The firefighters saved the called-for building.
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Answers: 1. Collective two. Compound three. Both (Flash mob is a collective noun considering it is a atypical substantive that refers to a group of people.) 4. Chemical compound (Seafood is an uncountable noun and not a collective noun.) 5. Compound (Firefighters is a plural noun based on the noun firefighter, which is not a collective noun.)
Source: https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/collective-noun/