Collective Nouns

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Collective Nouns

Collective nouns refer to groups of people, animals, or things.

Examples:

audience, band, class, club, crowd, collection, committee
family, flock, group, herd, team

Example sentences:

Our class went to the museum today.

The audience clapped wildly at the end of the play.

I love my stamp collection!

A class is made up of a group of students acting as one whole, an audience is made up of a group of people acting as one whole, and a collection is made up of a group of things (in this case, stamps) acting as one whole.

Singular or Plural?

So, what do you think? Are they singular or plural? They name things that come together to act as one group.

If you said singular, you're right!

Even though each of these nouns is made up of many people, animals, or things, it names the group as a whole, which means that it is a singular noun.

You can make them plural the same way that you make other nouns plural. Usually, this means adding an s or es at the end of the word.

Singular	Plural
class	classes
crowd	crowds
family	families
flock	flocks

For instance, schools are made up of more than one class of students. Because of this, we would say that there are multiple classes in a school.

Class is singular, and classes is plural.

Sentence Diagramming

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