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In the 19th century book, A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, a proverb concerning magpies is recited: "A single magpie in spring, foul weather will bring". The book further explains that this superstition arises from the habits of pairs of magpies to forage together only when the weather is fine.
This list was originally spread out several pages of collective nouns, including one for "reptiles and amphibians", one for "fish, invertebrates, and plants", the existing one for "birds" and also several separate pages listing collective nouns by term and by subject. Over a lengthy period of time, myself and others merged the pages into this ...
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.
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").
From a merge: This is a redirect from a page that was merged into another page.This redirect was kept in order to preserve the edit history of this page after its content was merged into the content of the target page.
The Eurasian magpie, for instance, is thought to rank among the world's most intelligent creatures, [1] [2] and is one of the few nonmammalian species able to recognize itself in a mirror test. [3] Magpies have shown the ability to make and use tools, imitate human speech, grieve, play games, and work in teams. [4]
Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, jays, treepies, choughs, and nutcrackers. [1] [2] [3] In colloquial English, they are known as the crow family or corvids.
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 ...