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Sep 13, 2005

This week's theme
Collective nouns

This week's words
sounder
covey
skein
bevy
skulk

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covey

noun:
1. A small flock of birds such as partridge or quail.
2. A group or a set.

From Middle English, from Old French covee (brood), feminine past participle of cover (to incubate, hatch), from Latin cubare (to lie down). Some other words in this brood that all came from the same Latin root are cubicle, incubate, couvade, and concubine.

"A black-tailed jackrabbit walks slowly down the wash, ambling tall-eared amid a covey of Gambel's quail, like a cowboy driving his herd."
Steve Howe; The Kingdom of the Cactus; Backpacker (Emmaus, Pennsylvania); Sep 1, 1995.

See more usage examples of covey in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

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