system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did/do scientists decide what a group of the same animal will be called? (herd, pack, etc)

Is there a system to it?  Often you just hear of flock, pod, school, swarm, pack, or herd, but I have also heard of unique ones for certain animals.  Such as a murder of crows, dazzle of zebra, sounder of pigs; crash, dale, or bloat of hippos.
gpt
This has nothing to do with scientists.

Back in the day, people had different words for groups of animals they were hunting, and originally it made sense: you would distinguish, for example, between a *flock* of geese on land and a *skein* of geese in flight; dogs form *packs* when hunting other animals, deer form *herds* to keep themselves safe from attack and will take flight if threatened.

So originally, the word you used for a group of animals would tell you something of the way that group was behaving.

In the Late Middle Ages, for some reason, people started inventing more and more words. Sometimes they might simply have been showing off, sometimes they might have been trying to be funny. In 1486, a publication called the *Book of Saint Albans* included a long list of these collective nouns, and at least some of them appear to have been jokes: a gaggle of women (because women gossip and giggle, or sound like geese), a subtlety of sergeants (ironic), a superfluity of nuns, and so on.

So that's really all it is. Originally a useful shorthand for hunters, it just became a joke that got out of control.