It's a confusing thing, but "cow" is used both to refer to a female individual (adult who has borne a calf), but also to generic individuals as well. Think about it, what would you call a single individual of that species if you didn't know its sex?
Since it is one of the easiest animals in the world to determine which sex is which, one glance would solve that problem immediately. If it has four little "thingys" hanging down in the back - it's a cow. One in the middle - it's a bull. As I've said many times in the past cow is female, bull is male, and cattle is the collective herd. I'm a very old country boy and this is one of the very few areas where my mind can't be changed so save your breath, logic, and reason. Believe whatever you want, but I'm a stubborn old cuss and that's the way it is - he said in his best Grandpa McCoy impersonation.
Sure, it would be a herd of cattle, but the question still is what would you call a generic individual of that herd? Hypothetically, say for whatever reason you couldn't tell or it didn't matter the sex of the individual. Your viewing angle isn't right to see the thingies hanging down, or it's too far away, or an individual ran away but you don't know whether it was male or female. What would you call it?
That is like saying a female is a hen a male is a rooster and collectively they are poultry. Sure they are poultry, but they should have a name that refers to an individual specimen of the species aswell.
do you think some of the words like bug or fish or fly appear in the list because they are commonly used as verbs as well? or is the list specific to most commonly used nouns?
Weird how spider is not on here but shrimp and salmon is. (Also kind of surprised about the absence of tiger, since lion is on here, would have thought they would ve gotten similar scores, but I see now lion is already quite close to the cutoff point)
That was an excellent choice of photograph for this quiz, @Quizmaster (says the current owner of her fourth member of the breed). Funnily enough, “Vizsla” didn’t make the list.
can anyone explain why deer is so high? maybe it's a geographical thing but i barely use the word day-to-day and can't imagine why it's scoring above so many others like fly and pig
Yeah, interesting one. I guess it beats the likes of cow and pig because we often talk about "pork", "beef", etc rather than the animal's name. Here in Scotland there is a lot of discussion in about controlling deer numbers because they have no predators and can destroy young trees and stuff. I suppose that kind of discussion adds to it a bit.
How did you differentiate between animals and other uses of the words when making this quiz because many of these words can be used as non-animal nouns (e.g.-bat), other parts of speech (e.g.-fly), and acronyms (e.g.-G.O.A.T.)?
There are many kinds of bears, chickens, cows, etc, and even then, these are only groupings of unique individuals in the population
So why is ‘cow’ included?