A Wisdom of Owls

Cartoon animals struggling to hold a heavy Placeholder Image sign while a bird prepares to land on top.
Something new is coming to Gaggle of Nouns. Even the animals are struggling to get it ready.

A group of owls is occasionally called a wisdom, one of the rarer entries on owl word lists — far less common in practice than “parliament,” but the most literal of all the owl collective nouns. It leans directly on the bird’s long-standing reputation as a symbol of wisdom and judgment, an association stretching back to ancient Greece, where the owl was the sacred bird of Athena, goddess of wisdom.

Bonus fact: owls have specially fringed wing feathers that break up turbulent airflow, letting them fly almost completely silently as they hunt — a trait that likely contributed to their reputation as mysterious, all-seeing creatures.

Unlike “parliament,” which has real cultural staying power thanks to fiction like Narnia, “wisdom” mostly survives on longer reference lists of collective nouns rather than in everyday use.

Related: Collective Nouns for Birds · What Is a Group of Owls Called? · A Parliament of Owls · A Stare of Owls · A Bazaar of Owls

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