Why Is a Group of Crows Called a Murder?

July 18, 2026

Black-and-ivory linocut illustration of three crows perched on bare branches above a small found object.

The familiar answer is that a group of crows is called a murder. In the field, birders usually say flock, count the birds, and move on. Yet the darker name escaped the glossary and now appears in headlines, novels, band names, and more than a few shirts.

Is a group of crows really called a murder?

Yes — but only in the traditional, literary sense. Murder is a fanciful collective noun, not a scientific classification. Ornithologists and birders normally use flock; a large gathering that settles together to sleep is a communal roost. The medieval term is genuine, but its exact origin is unknown.

The source everyone gets wrong

The expression is often traced to the Book of Saint Albans, printed in 1486 and traditionally attributed to Dame Juliana Berners. The book is real, and its list includes an unkindness of ravens. What it does not appear to include is a murder of crows.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this sense an entry of its own, murder, n.², kept separate from the word for killing, and defines it simply as a flock of crows. It records an earlier form, a morther of crowys, in a late Middle English glossarial source, and dates its earliest evidence to before 1475, in the manuscript miscellany catalogued as MS Porkington 10. The dictionary lists the noun's origin as uncertain, and describes the term as “one of many alleged group names” found in such sources. That cautious alleged matters: this may have been a clever entry in a vocabulary list rather than a phrase anyone used while looking at birds.

A medieval word game

These lists mixed animal names with jokes about human groups: a diligence of messengers, a gaggle of women, a superfluity of nuns. They were displays of wit and social vocabulary, not field notes from working naturalists.

We do not know why the unknown compiler chose murder, and neither does the dictionary. The familiar explanation points to black plumage, carrion, gallows, and battlefields. It sounds convincing, which is probably why it is repeated so often, but there is no surviving evidence that this story produced the word.

The term also seems not to have survived in continuous everyday use. It faded and was revived in the twentieth century along with a wider taste for fanciful collective nouns.

Why this one lasted

Probably because it sounds good, and because it landed near something true. Crows really do gather around their dead, and people have been watching them do it for a very long time.

So the medieval name is wrong in an interesting direction. It casts the crows as killers when they are closer to witnesses taking notes. Whoever wrote morther of crowys could not have known that. The phrase survived because, five centuries later, the scene still looks as dark as the word.

Do crows hold funerals?

Not in the way the phrase suggests, but they do gather. Popular folklore describes a crow court, or a crow parliament: the birds assembling around one of their own, deliberating, passing sentence. It is a good story, and something in the field really does happen.

In 2015, Kaeli Swift and John Marzluff reported in Animal Behaviour that wild American crows respond to a dead crow by scolding, recruiting other crows to the spot, and mobbing. Afterwards they treat the place, and any human face associated with it, as dangerous.

The experiment demonstrates that these gatherings help crows learn about danger. It does not establish whether crows experience anything comparable to grief, so funeral remains a popular description rather than a scientific conclusion. What the study does show is something close to an incident report: the birds collect information about where a crow died and who was standing nearby, then the warning travels through the local population.

How many crows make a murder?

There is no official count. Ornithologists do not enforce a quorum, and the term was never a scientific classification to begin with, just a piece of medieval wordplay that outlived its origin. In practice, three or four crows loitering together are usually enough for people to reach for the word.

The vagueness is not an accident. Collective nouns of this kind were never counting words, they were labels for a scene. A murder is however many crows it takes for the sight to feel like one.

What is a group of ravens called?

An unkindness, and occasionally a conspiracy. Neither one is a murder, though the two birds get mixed up constantly.

Both terms come from the same medieval habit of inventing collective nouns for the fun of it, and the Book of Saint Albans does list the unkindness of ravens, which is more than it does for crows. Whether anyone outside those glossaries ever said it out loud is another matter entirely.

In practice, crows keep company in family groups and enormous winter roosts. Breeding ravens often travel as territorial pairs, although young and nonbreeding ravens can gather at rich food sources. If you are trying to work out which bird is in front of you, our field guide covers the tail, the voice, and the rest.

From the archive

The murder that patrols our corner of the woods is documented on the Murder of Crows specimen, printed to order on heavyweight Comfort Colors cotton. The rest of the corvid file, ravens included, is kept in Crow and Raven Shirts, and the older omens attached to both birds sit in Folklore.