What Does “A Bloat of Hippopotamuses” Mean?
“Bloat” is the standard, most widely recognized collective noun for hippopotamuses, and it’s about as blunt as collective nouns get: a direct reference to the animal’s massive, rounded, water-buoyed bulk. Unlike more poetic or historical terms of venery, this one reads as plain physical description, the kind of word that needed no medieval hunting tradition to justify it.
Hippos are among the heaviest land mammals alive, and much of that mass is built for buoyancy: they spend most of the day submerged in rivers and lakes to keep their skin from drying out and overheating in the African sun, only emerging at night to graze on land. “Bloat” captures that image of dense, floating bulk better than any of the animal’s several secondary terms, including herd, pod, and the borrowed rhino term “crash.”
Example: “A bloat of hippopotamuses lounged half-submerged in the river shallows, only their eyes and ears breaking the surface.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Mammals · What Is a Group of Hippopotamuses Called? · A Crash of Hippopotamuses