An Exaltation of Larks

A delightfully unexpected, lovingly curated ode to the unique collective nouns that adorn our language, from “a leap of leopards” to “a murder of crows” and beyond, from the inimitable voice behind Inside the Actors Studio

“I am madly in love with collective nouns! They make language so colorful and ticklish. . . . [An Exaltation of Larks] possess[es] an embarrassment of riches (wink wink!).” —Lupita Nyong’o, The New York Times

For those who have wondered if the familiar “pride of lions” and “gaggle of geese” were merely the tip of a linguistic iceberg, James Lipton has provided a definitive answer: here are hundreds of equally pithy, often poetic terms he has unearthed and collected into one exhaustive volume. Over years of painstaking research, he embarked on an odyssey that has given us a “slouch of models,” a “shrivel of critics,” an “unction of undertakers,” a “blur of Impressionists,” a “score of bachelors,” a “pocket of quarterbacks,” and many more.

Witty, beautiful, and remarkably apt, An Exaltation of Larks is a brilliant compendium of more than 1,100 resurrected or newly minted contributions to that ever-evolving species, the English language.