What Does “A Kine of Cattle” Mean?
“Kine” is a bit of a linguistic oddity on this list, because it isn’t really a collective noun for cattle so much as it is an old plural of the word “cow” itself. In Middle English, “kine” served the same grammatical role that “cows” does today, an irregular plural formed the same unusual way “oxen” is the plural of “ox,” rather than through the standard “add an -s” pattern.
By the time modern English settled into its current form, “kine” had fallen out of everyday use, replaced by the more regular “cows,” but it lingered in literature, religious texts, and poetry for centuries afterward, giving it an old-fashioned, almost biblical tone that survives in occasional historical or stylistic usage today.
Calling it “a kine of cattle” is a little like saying “a cows of cattle,” it’s technically redundant, but its inclusion here preserves a genuinely interesting fossil of older English grammar, the kind of word that shows just how much the language has quietly reshaped itself over the centuries.
Example: “The old translation of the passage referred simply to ‘the kine,’ with no further explanation needed for readers of its time.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Mammals · What Is a Group of Cattle Called?