One of the (many) peculiarities of the English language is the multitude of names given to collections or groups – mainly wildlife, but also people and things. We are all familiar with a pride of lions, a mob of kangaroos or even a murmuration of starlings, but how about a confusion of guinea fowl, a journey of giraffes, an eloquence of lawyers, a bellow of bullfinches, an aurora of polar bears, a sounder of wild boar or a company of archer fish?

The tradition of creating collective nouns arose in the Late Middle Ages, and continues today; a parliament of owls, for example, was first coined by CS Lewis in the 1950s in his ‘Narnia’ stories.