What Is a Group of Ravens Called? One Word, From 1486

Turn to the leaf signed f iiij in a book printed at St Albans in 1486 and a hunting poem in rhyming couplets simply stops. Beneath it the printer set a colophon: “Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng.” That closed the treatise and left him seven blank pages to fill before the next section could begin.

He filled them with proverbs, a folk rhyme about two wives in one house, and a long list of words. Partway down the list, sitting between a flight of doves and a clattering of choughs, is the phrase the internet has been quoting ever since: an vnkyndenes of Rauenes.

What is a group of ravens called?

A group of ravens is called an unkindness. The word survives from one line in the Book of St Albans, printed in 1486, which spells it “an vnkyndenes of Rauenes” in a list headed “The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys”. No other raven term appears in that book. Ornithologists describe communal roosts, mostly of young non-breeders.

The line existed to fill seven blank pages

William Blades reproduced the whole 1486 edition in facsimile in 1881 and worked out how the page came to exist at all. Each treatise was set to end inside its own gathering of leaves so that it could be sold alone, and the hunting rhymes ran out early.

The same idea controlled the arrangement of “The Book of Hunting,” which, beginning on sig. e j, ends with Dame Juliana’s “Explicit” on the recto of sig. f iiij. This left the last seven pages of the quaternion to be filled up.

Blades adds that early printers routinely used leftover pages for “such common household aphorisms or popular rhymes as came easily to the memory”, and that the word list “was evidently copied from some MS.” Nobody at St Albans sat down to compile English collective nouns. The printer had paper to use up and reached for a manuscript already lying around.

A second detail goes unmentioned almost everywhere. The colophon carrying Juliana Berners’s name sits before the list, not after it, so every article crediting her with “an unkindness of ravens” is crediting her with a page printed outside the one section her name is attached to. Blades wrote that “what is really known of the Dame is almost nothing”, and noted that the surviving lists of fifteenth-century prioresses of Sopwell never mention her.

The list was a gentleman’s word game

There are 164 entries. Blades describes it as “the list of proper terms to be used by gentlemen and those curious in their speech”, which is a fair account of the job it did: proving in company that you had the vocabulary. Later word games left entries of their own: floccinaucinihilipilification, first recorded in 1741 and once the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary, was built as a learned joke from four Latin words in an Eton College grammar.

Many entries are animals. The rest include a Cast of Brede, a Clustre of Grapys, a Clustre of Nottis, a Couple or a payer of botillis and, under a heading about beasts and fowls, a Rage of the teethe. Toothache made the cut.

The list also mocks people, at length: a superfluity of nuns, a melody of harpers, a blast of hunters, a subtlety of sergeants, an abominable sight of monks, a disworship of Scots, and an uncredibility of cuckolds. Not one of the 164 entries carries an explanation. The book never says why ravens are an unkindness, or why toothache is a rage.

There is no murder of crows in it

The word murder appears nowhere in the 1486 text, and the book gives no collective term for crows at all. Crows turn up twice in the hawking treatise, once as quarry listed beside rooks and ravens, and once as meat for a hawk fresh out of its moult. Rooks got a term of their own, “a beldyng of Rookes”, and starlings got “a Murmuracion of stares”. The crows got nothing.

Reading the whole book also settles the alternates that get printed beside unkindness on almost every page about this question.

Term	In the 1486 Book of St Albans
an vnkyndenes of Rauenes	Yes, once
a beldyng of Rookes	Yes
a Murmuracion of stares	Yes
a murder of crows	No, and no crow entry exists
a conspiracy of ravens	No
a treachery of ravens	No
a storytelling of ravens	No
a parliament of ravens	No

The extras have a traceable modern home. James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks carries the phrase the 1486 list spells “an Exaltyng of Larkis”, and Penguin’s own description of the book calls it “a brilliant compendium of more than 1,100 resurrected or newly minted contributions” to English. A slouch of models, a shrivel of critics, an unction of undertakers and a pocket of quarterbacks are among the ones that copy advertises, and it opens by offering a murder of crows as an example of the form. Collective nouns are a live parlour game, and a word with an exactly documented past, like the moment that was once a fixed unit of 90 seconds, is the exception.

Unkind may not have meant cruel

“Kind” as an adjective descends from Old English (ge)cynde, meaning natural, native and innate, from the same root as kin. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the matching sense for the negative: Old English uncynde, “unnatural, not in accord with the regular course of nature”, a meaning now obsolete. The modern sense, lacking in kindness, arrived in the mid-14th century. English was loose with kin words too: through Middle English, cousin also covered grandchildren and godchildren, and second cousin still has two dictionary senses naming two different relatives.

The older sense was live on those same pages: the hunting rhymes have a roebuck that bells “by kynde”, and Blades glosses “kyndeli” in this book as “natural”. The compiler left no note saying which reading he meant. A term explained online a thousand times as a comment on raven cruelty may have been a comment on raven strangeness. Names outlive their reasons, which is how an island of ice ended up advertised as green.

The crowd you see is made of teenagers

Modern raven research supplies the part the word lists skip. In a 2009 PLOS ONE paper, Sasha Dall and Jonathan Wright set out how ravens feed: “Carcasses are usually discovered and defended by the local resident territorial pair of adult birds, and it normally requires groups of floating non-territorial juveniles to displace them.”

The crowd is the cohort without property. Non-breeding juveniles forage socially and gather at communal winter roosts that work as information centres about where food has turned up. At the Newborough roost on Anglesey in north Wales, Dall and Wright record a main roost of 500 to 1,500 birds, with breakaway sub-roosts of about 30 birds each whose members search and feed together as a gang.

Settled adult pairs sit outside that crowd, holding a territory and defending a carcass against it. The University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web gives the default state of the species as alone or in pairs.

The nest-neglect story is folklore

The reason usually attached to “unkindness” is that medieval people believed ravens shoved their young out of the nest and abandoned them. No source for that belief appears in the 1486 book, which offers no reasons for anything on its list, and the biology runs the other way. The same Animal Diversity Web account records that both parents care for the young after hatching, and that the young leave the nest between five and seven weeks of age. Folk explanations get bolted onto old words after the fact, which is also why the chicken-and-egg question refuses to settle.

So English has exactly one attested word for a group of ravens, it was set in type to stop seven pages going to waste, and the birds it describes are mostly adolescents loitering near a carcass because they do not yet own anywhere better to be. Strictly FYI.