There’s something nearly magical about collective nouns - they are so colorful and in some cases downright funny that they capture the imagination. More than any other facet of English grammar, they seem to inspire “open sourcing” - witness the outpouring of suggestions for new collective nouns on Twitter, for example. My own fascination with collective nouns goes back at least a couple of years - in fact, I once went so far as to publish a proposed data format for collective nouns. It’s with some sadness, then, that I recently learned that the website All Sorts appears to have kicked the bucket.

All Sorts was perhaps at the cutting edge of linguistic open sourcing. It actively gathered and collated collective nouns from across the web, including the aforementioned Twitter hash tag. I’m not entirely sure what’s happened to the site. The domain hasn’t expired, but it appears that the servers are no longer responding. The last successful Internet Archive snapshot of the site was last July - only a month or two after I discovered it, alas.

I’d love to see the effort revived, and more than that, expanded upon. I think the fascination with collective nouns is not just that they are such a fun quirk of language. They also tell us something about our collective belief about the noun being collectivized - a “pride” of lions is something very different from a “shrewdness” of apes. And they give us insight into history as well: some of the more exotic collective nouns are also called “terms of venery” because they originated with hunting expeditions some centuries ago. (Venery is an older word for hunting, derived from the French verb - itself an interesting commentary on the complex relationship between the aristocracies of Renaissance England and France.) It would be so exciting to see a revival of this project, with an eye towards the history and editorial complexity embedded in these nouns.

For now, I’ll bid the site a fond farewell, it was an exciting effort while it lasted!