0 a noun that describes a group of things or people as a unit:
"Family" and "flock" are examples of collective nouns.
Bostick's entertainingly illustrated contribution to the book consists of a salvo of plasmoids (if that is the appropriate collective noun).
Formally, collective noun forms such as a group of people are represented by second-order variables, or by first-order variables standing for sets (which are well-defined objects in mathematics and logic).
Familiar examples are 'police' and 'people', apart from the large set of collective nouns like 'committee', 'government', 'family', 'mob'.
Incorrect use of collective nouns was found to be the easiest detectable error, followed by word order distortions.
Concord with collective nouns revisited.
The plural concord here may also be reinforced by notional concord, since board, as a collective noun, can be notionally plural.
In the above examples the reciprocal takes a singular collective noun as its antecedent.
In other words, the base is no longer a collective noun when the plural marker is added.
