It’s Word Origins Week on Smartest Year Ever! Today, Gordy uncovers the strange story behind animal group names—like a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, and a gaggle of geese.

But who made these names up? And were they ever real?

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why many animal group names came from a 15th-century hunting manual
  

• How some were aristocratic memes, not scientific terms
  

• Which names were serious—and which were jokes (a drunkenness of cobblers?)
  

• Why the internet made it worse
  

It’s a fascinating mix of medieval wordplay, linguistic history, and modern mythbusting—perfectly bridging last week’s Weird Animals theme with this week’s word origin deep dives.

🔍 New here? Gordy does this every day. Hit follow and join the journey to become the World’s Greatest Conversationalist.

Sources:

• Berners, J. (1486). The Boke of Saint Albans. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/71266/pg71266-images.html
  

• Hodgkin, K. (2010). The Book of St Albans: The Language of Hunting and the Invention of Tradition. In Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources. University of Illinois Press.
  

• Crystal, D. (2005). The Stories of English. Penguin Books.
  

• Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). Collective Nouns (Terms of Venery). OED Online.
  

• Pillion, D. (2023). What Do You Call a Group of Bunnies? Not a Fluffle. Alabama Media Group.
  

• Barry, D. (2014). Collective Nouns: The Unlikely History of a Gaggle, a Murder, and a Flamboyance. The New York Times.
  

• World Wide Words. (n.d.). Terms of Venery. https://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/collective.htm
  

#WordOrigins #AnimalGroupNames #Linguistics #languagehistory #FunFacts #Etymology #DailyFacts #DidYouKnow Music thanks to Zapsplat.