murmuration
noun

murmuration
noun

- a large flock of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) flying and manoeuvring together in fluid, shape-shifting formation before roosting at dusk; named after the sound produced by thousands of wingbeats.

- the collective noun for a group of starlings; also, the natural phenomenon of their coordinated aerial display, in which no single bird leads and each individual responds only to its nearest seven neighbours.

Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster

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WORD ORIGIN

The word murmur is one of the oldest in the English language — and almost certainly one of the oldest in human speech altogether. Linguists classify it as echoic or onomatopoeic: its sound imitates the thing it describes.

The Latin murmur meant a rushing, rumbling, or humming sound — water over stones, wind in leaves, bees in a hive, or voices in a crowd speaking too low to be understood. The Romans used it for complaint too: a dissatisfied crowd murmurābat, muttered. The same root turns up in Greek (mormorē, a roaring sound), in Sanskrit (marmara, rustling), and in Old High German murmurōn — the word has near-identical cousins in almost every Indo-European language, suggesting it goes back at least 5,000 years to a time before those languages split apart.

Into English it arrived via Old French murmure, and by the 14th century it covered both physical sounds and low verbal dissatisfaction. Shakespeare used it in both senses.

The collective noun murmuration — specifically for a group of starlings — appears in the remarkable 1486 handbook "The Book of Saint Albans", attributed to Dame Juliana Berners. This text gave English an entire glossary of poetic collective nouns: a parliament of owls, an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows. The term likely referred to the audible hiss of thousands of wings, but it was not in common circulation until the 20th century, when wildlife documentary and photography brought the phenomenon to mass attention.

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ANIMAL COLLECTIVES

You probably know the collective nouns “a flock of sheep” or “a herd of cows”, but the English language has many other ways of describing living-creature groups.

Can you match the following animals with their collectives?

ants, bats, bees, camels, cows, crows, dolphins, donkeys, fish, geese, hounds, larks, lions, monkeys, owls, sheep, turkeys

army, colony, drove, exaltation, flock, gaggle, gang, herd, murder, pack, parliament, pride, pod, shoal, swarm, train, troop

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- an army of ants
- a colony of bats
- a drove of donkeys
- an exaltation of larks
- a flock of sheep
- a gaggle of geese
- a gang of turkeys
- a herd of cows
- a murder of crows
- a pack of hounds
- a parliament of owls
- a pod of dolphins
- a pride of lions
- a shoal of fish
- a swarm of bees
- a train of camels
- a troop of monkeys

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SYNONYMS

a cloud of birds, a coordinated display, a flock in flight, a living cloud, a river in the sky, a rolling wave of birds, a shape-shifting mass, a swirling flock, aerial ballet (display), collective/flock/swarm behaviour (dynamics, intelligence, motion, movement), flocking, group flight, herd/hive behaviour, hive mind, leaderless coordination, mass flight, MURMURATION, roosting flight, self-organisation, self-organising system, shoaling (fish equivalent), spontaneous order, starling display, swarming, the rule of seven, undulating mass, wave motion

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“To see an amazing MURMURATION of 10 million starlings check out 'Ten Million Starlings' on YouTube.”

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