Etymon #60
Loves a flock
The word entered English in 1668, in a work by Bishop John Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, and later Bishop of Chester. His Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language was an attempt to create a universal language understood across all nations, classifying all known creatures and concepts, and he used the word to describe animals that move and feed together rather than alone. Behind the English lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a single noun for a herd or a flock.
It entered English directly from Latin, with an English suffix added to the Latin stem. John Ray, the naturalist who laid the foundations of modern taxonomy, used it in 1678 in his translation of The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, describing starlings as birds that live and fly together in great flocks. Varro, the Roman scholar whose Rerum Rusticarum, published around 37 BC, was one of the ancient world's most thorough accounts of farming and animal husbandry, used the Latin form to describe animals that gathered and moved as one.
Behind the Latin noun lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *ger-, meaning to gather. The same root gave Greek agora, the open space at the heart of every ancient Greek city where citizens gathered to trade and debate, and probably gave Sanskrit grāmaḥ, meaning a collection of people. From that same root came the Latin grex, the word for a herd of animals or a flock of birds.
EGREGIOUS and CONGREGATE share the same Latin root as this word. EGREGIOUS came from Latin egregius, built from the word for a flock with a prefix meaning out of, naming someone who stood out from the herd. By the seventeenth century the word had reversed entirely, and now names something that is outstandingly bad. CONGREGATE came from the same Latin root with a prefix meaning together, and gave English both the verb for assembling and the noun for the people who fill a church.
For its first century in English the word belonged entirely to the natural world. Oliver Goldsmith, whose History of Earth of 1774 was one of the most widely read works of natural history of the eighteenth century, used it to describe the behaviour shared by all creatures that move in groups. The word's shift to being applied to humans started in 1789, when Hester Lynch Piozzi, the writer and diarist who had been a close friend of Samuel Johnson, used it in her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany to describe the pull of company that she felt wherever she travelled. In 1855 Charles Dickens used it in a letter, writing of the effect that a shared excitement produces in a crowd.
