![]() It's important to note that not all nouns are the same. This goes to show how important nouns are in English and why you may want to create a random list of just them in particular. If we estimate there are approximately 2 million words in the English language, and a look at any dictionary shows approximately 75% of them are nouns, then we can estimate there should be around 1,500,000 nouns in the English language. They most often occur as the main word in the subject of a clause or the object of a verb.Įven if there is no exact agreed upon number of nouns in the English language, a rough calculation suggests there are at least hundreds of thousands of them, and likely more than one million. Nouns are one of the main parts of speech and sentence. That's exactly what the random noun generator does.Ī noun is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing, people or place. For example, you may want to create a random list of just nouns. A bit of alliteration helps as well.There may be times when you'll want to generate a random list of a particular part of speech rather than all words in general. The choice of word for the collective noun seems to incline towards some characteristic feature. ![]() The pride of lions appears in the OED with its first citation from the Book of St Albans and the next citations from the early 1900s, in the context of safaris in Africa, so it has taken on a real life in the English language, but others, like the parliament of owls and the murder of crows, dwell in the half-life. The exaltation of larks, the unkindness of ravens, the chattering of choughs. Many of the old favourites that have endured for centuries without any real existence in the English language appear in Juliana’s collection. From this we leap to modern inventions such as a crash of rhinoceroses, a concern of social workers, a consternation of mothers. Who else but the prioress could have come up with a superfluity of nuns? Other whimsicalities were the barren of mules, the skulk of foxes, the state of princes. There is no conclusive evidence of the existence of Juliana because some priory records are missing for that period but we are led to believe that she was from an aristocratic family and was extremely fond of hunting. Not only did she put together a list of collective nouns for ‘beestings and fowles’, but she invented some in a humorous vein, thus setting in motion a favourite game for language lovers for centuries to come. Juliana seems to have written the section on hunting although the rest of it comes from other sources. It also goes under the title of The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms and was a bestseller in its day. The first compilation of collective nouns was made by a prioress, Juliana Berners, who is credited with authorship of a book published in 1486 entitled The Book of St Albans. There are not even inspired guesses that seem plausible. We don’t know the origin of the word flock, though we can date it back to Old English and know that it is related to Old Norse. Originally it referred to a group of people but then it was used of animals, and specifically of sheep. The word flock is similarly old but worked the other way around. Originally it was used of animals but then generalised to people, as in the phrase the common herd. The word herd goes back to Old English and Old Germanic where it meant ‘a gathering’. Some of these names are very old and obviously had a use in a hunting or agricultural context. A swarm of bees, though composed of many individuals, has a unity of its own that can be given a name. A collective noun is a name for a group of people or animals that we see as a unit.
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