they're called 'terms of venery.'Terms of venery are a subset of
collective nouns restricted to describing groups of animals. The asked for meta-collective noun probably doesn't fall into that category. FWIW, the TsC (tsuwm's count) for
collective noun is 13 (general), 15 (special),
link, and for
terms of venery it's 1 (general), 2 (special),
link. The first number is the number of Outlook results in the general category, and the second number includes specialty dictionaries, e.g., medicine, art. (Anyway, I added that to the mix, because Occam's razor be damned.) I suppose in these days of Inter-Web variability one should also add an access date, such as referenced in Wikipedia. For the record, the Dahilian semantico-typo-lexical constants for
type-1 word,
type-2 word,
type-3 word are all 0 (zero). (Personally, I don't think tsuwm's method is complicated enough. The number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin ought to be taken into account as some sort of leavening number.
