Collective nouns


My favourite collective noun has always been a 'charm' of goldfinches, so it's very nice to have a charm in the field outside my window. There seem to be about a dozen of them, flitting to and fro all day long, and occasionally resting for a moment on the topmost leaves of the winter-flowering viburnum. The list of collective nouns in the back of my primary school English textbook used to fascinate me, and I tried to become expert at remembering them. I loved all those lists - homonyms and synonyms and the rest of them, though I could never quite remember which was which!

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