A murder of crows, a superfluity of nuns
The oddest words in English were invented in a single how-to book for gentlemen. Most of them promptly died — and the few that lived tell you exactly what keeps a word alive.
You already know some of these, and you have probably never wondered why. A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle. A group of lions is a pride. And a group of crows — for reasons no one at the dinner table ever explains — is a murder. Larks, meanwhile, do not gather in a flock; they gather, gorgeously, in an exaltation. Owls convene a parliament. Starlings swirl into a murmuration. Ravens keep company as an unkindness.
These are called terms of venery — “venery” being an old word for hunting — and the strange thing about them is not that they are poetic. It is that most of them can be traced to a single source: a small, wildly popular book printed more than five centuries ago, as a kind of etiquette manual for men who wanted to sound like they belonged.
A vocabulary primer for the nervous gentleman
The book is The Book of Saint Albans, printed at St Albans in 1486 — one of the earliest printed books in the English language. It bundled three subjects a well-bred person was expected to hold forth on without stumbling: hawking, hunting, and heraldry. It was, in the most literal sense, a vocabulary-booster: a primer to keep a gentleman-in-training from committing some blunder at the table when the talk turned to sport.
Tucked into the hunting section is a chapter with the wonderful title “The Compaynys of Beestys and Fowlys” — the companies of beasts and fowls — and it lists roughly 160 ways to name a group of things. Some are so ordinary now that they have gone invisible: this book holds what may be the first written record of a gaggle of geese and a pride of lions. Others are pure display — words chosen not because a hunter needed them in the field, but because they were clever, and being clever out loud was the entire point.
The purpose was never precision. It was performance — a way to signal, in a single well-turned phrase, that you were the sort of person who knew the right word.
The authorship, fittingly for a book about names, is itself a bit of a legend. The hunting material is traditionally credited to Dame Juliana Berners (or Barnes), said to have been the prioress of Sopwell, a small nunnery near St Albans. Whether she truly wrote it — whether she existed quite as described — scholars have argued for centuries. The words outlived any certainty about the woman, which is a pattern we will come back to.
Half of them were jokes about people
Here is the part the nature documentaries leave out. Nearly half the terms in the list are not about animals at all. They are about people — and almost every one is a wink.
A group of judges is a sentence of judges. A group of doctors is a doctrine of doctors. Harpers make a melody of harpers; messengers, a diligence of messengers. And the compiler clearly had opinions: nuns arrive as a superfluity of nuns, and the list runs on into a fighting of beggars and, memorably, an uncredibilite of cuckolds. These were not field observations. They were the fifteenth century’s idea of a good pun — social commentary smuggled inside a grammar of crowds.
Which tells you what these words really were: not tools, but ornaments. A term of venery was a small showpiece, minted to be admired and repeated at a table by people who already shared the joke. It was language as a badge of belonging — the medieval cousin of every in-group code a city has ever built.
A short bestiary, if you like the strange ones
- a murder of crows
- an exaltation of larks
- a parliament of owls
- a murmuration of starlings
- an unkindness of ravens
- a superfluity of nuns
- a sentence of judges
Most of them died — and that is the lesson
Now the twist. For all their charm, the fanciful terms did not last. There was a brief craze for them, and then, through the sixteenth century, most quietly fell out of use. A murder of crows — the phrase we now treat as ancient and self-evident — dropped out of the language almost entirely, and had to be rediscovered in the early twentieth century, lifted back off the page by writers who loved the sound of it. It did not survive as speech. It survived as a quotation.
Compare that with gaggle, and pride, and school, and flock. Those never needed rediscovering, because they never left. They stayed in ordinary mouths, doing ordinary work, and so they were simply there — passed hand to hand across twenty generations without anyone consulting a book. The elaborate ones lived on a list; the plain ones lived in use. Guess which kind you actually know.
The fascination never faded, mind you. In 1968 the American writer James Lipton gathered the old terms into a beloved book, An Exaltation of Larks, and could not resist adding his own in the same spirit — a glaze of tourists, a shush of librarians. That is the tradition at its truest: not a fixed inventory to be memorised, but a living game anyone can still play, because the words that count are made and kept by people using them.
Where vocabla fits
The Book of Saint Albans ran an unintentional experiment, and the result is on record. Set two kinds of word loose in the world — one memorised from a beautiful list, one met in the ordinary traffic of speech — and come back five hundred years later to see which is still breathing. The list-words mostly had to be dug up. The used-words were still in everyone’s mouth.
That is the grain vocabla is cut along, in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian alike. Not a superfluity of vocabulary to be crammed and quietly forgotten, but words met in the sentences where they live, heard in many voices, and returned to enough times that one day the meaning is simply there — no page to consult, no pause. A term of venery is a word kept in a book. The words you are learning now deserve better than that: they deserve to be used, until they belong to you the way gaggle belongs to everyone — without a single soul remembering where it came from.