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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").
The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans, an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners. [1] Most terms used here may be found in common dictionaries and general information web sites.
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 ...
Although many languages treat collective nouns as singular, in others they may be interpreted as plural. In British English, phrases such as the committee are meeting are common (the so-called agreement in sensu "in meaning"; with the meaning of a noun, rather than with its form, see constructio ad sensum). The use of this type of construction ...
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.
This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated. There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns ), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase ( phrasal verbs ), and verb + adverb.
Generally, collective nouns such as group, family, and committee are not mass nouns but are rather a special subset of count nouns. However, the term "collective noun" is often used to mean "mass noun" (even in some dictionaries) because users conflate two different kinds of verb number invariability: (a) that seen with mass nouns such as ...
A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest or work together to achieve a common objective. [ citation needed ] Collectives can differ from cooperatives in that they are not necessarily focused upon an economic benefit or saving, though they can be.