Terms of venery are special types of collective nouns that denote groups of animals. The word venery entered English in the early 14th century through the Medieval Latin venaria, which means “beasts of the chase, game.” Although archaic by today’s standards, venery can still be used to mean “the practice of hunting.” //

This history is why terms of venery sound like verbal filigree. They weren’t coined by scientists creating a way to catalogue species, but by 15th-century English gentlemen who were showing off their wit. When these Englishmen went hunting, they would devise names for animal groups based on their poetic interpretation of nature. Some of these terms were clever (a charm of hummingbirds), some obvious (a paddling of ducks), and others just pretentious (an ostentation of peacocks, really?).

Nor was the trend limited to birds. Terms of venery gave us congregations of alligators, armies of caterpillars, cauldrons of bats, and sloths of bears.