Let's Learn English! Topic: Groups of People 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦👩‍👦👨‍👧‍👦 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello and welcome to this

English lesson about groups of people.

In particular, I'll be talking about the collective

nouns that we use to talk about different

groups and what those groups do in English.

You need to be able to talk about groups

of people because you might be in a band,

you might go and watch a sports game.

You might be one of the spectators.

There are a lot of words we use

to describe people when they're all together.

After all, life isn't about doing

things by yourself all the time.

Sometimes it's fun to go out and be part of

a group of people to do a specific activity or

to do something that only works if you have more

than one person or lots of people.

So, once again, welcome to this English

lesson about the collective nouns we use

to talk about groups of people.

Group.

So the word group is the general term, the most

common term for more than three or four people.

You can't really have a group of two.

If there's two people, we just say two people.

If it's in a class and you have to

work with another student, we would say your partners.

When you have three people, though, you can call it

a group or four or seven or 50 or thousands.

You have a whole bunch of people in the same place.

The general term would be a group.

So you can see here is a group of people.

It might be a group of people at work, but

this is definitely more than two people in one place.

So we would call this a group.

Again, group is the general term for describing

three or more people in the same place.

They don't always have to be in the same

place, but I think you know what I mean.

A mob.

So there's a few ways to describe a mob.

A mob is a large group of people,

and they're usually angry or they're doing something

they're not supposed to be doing.

So a mob is not kind. Usually.

Usually a mob is angry about

something, or they might be intoxicated.

Maybe they're celebrating a recent win

by their team or a loss.

But this would be a mob.

Um, and we have a couple of words to describe mobs.

You might say an angry mob, like

I just mentioned, or an unruly mob.

I should have put the word unruly on the screen.

But a mob would be a large group of people. Yeah.

Who are either, like, they're upset about something,

or you can even have a mob form

from a celebration, especially if people are intoxicated

and they might start destroying things. A team.

So a team is a group of people.

Who all the same sport, and all are

part of the same group of people that

play against another group of people.

I think you know what a team is.

It's probably one of the first words you learn

in English or one of the first 500.

You know, he plays on a football team, he plays

on a soccer team, she plays on a hockey team.

We also, though, use the word team

to talk about work as well.

So I could be on a team, and

that team might be assigned a project.

So at your work, the boss might say, joe Frank, Lisa,

I'm going to put you on a team, and you need

to find out how to make more money for the company.

And so now you are part of a team, and

you will work with those people on that project.

So again, you might be on a basketball team, you might be

on a team at work that has to figure out how to

be more efficient or how to make things work better.

So sometimes this team might be

more fun than this team.

A gang.

So you will see this on TV and in movies.

Hopefully you don't see this very often in real life,

but a gang is often used to refer to a

group of people, usually teenagers or people in their 20s,

who commit crimes and do illegal things.

If you are a parent, you do

not want your kid joining a gang.

Now, we do use this word sometimes subtly, like, me

and a gang of friends went to see a movie.

But when you watch TV and you watch a

police show, if they're having trouble with a gang,

they usually mean a group of people who are

committing crimes, maybe they're doing other illegal activities and

the police are trying to catch them.

So gang protesters.

So protesters are people who are

very, very upset about something.

They maybe don't like what the government is doing.

And so they will make signs and

they will gather as a group.

The protesters will gather maybe outside of a

government building, and they'll have their signs and

they'll yell things like, taxes are too high.

Um, I was trying to think of another one.

But there are many things that you can protest.

And if you are part of a group that

is protesting, we would call you a protester.

So here we have a whole bunch of protesters.

They are in the act of protesting.

They are very upset about something.

I don't know what it is, but far sign says stem. Maybe.

Maybe they.

Maybe they don't like plants.

That's just a little joke.

I don't know what they're upset about.

A union.

So if you work at a factory, if you work

in an organization where the workers have united so that

when they negotiate with their employer, they have more power.

Call that a union.

Some people are in a union and some people aren't.

In Canada, if you work at a steel factory,

you will probably be in the steel workers union.

If you are a carpenter in Toronto, you

are probably part of the carpenter's union.

So a union is when workers join

together so that they're not all individuals.

So groups have more power than an individual person.

And so sometimes people at a

place of work will unionize.

They will join together as a union in

order to be able to do things together,

like especially to negotiate working conditions and wages.

These are not words, but these are.

These are things we say.

This is kind of a hard one to explain.

Will understand the meaning.

The other day I had a car full of kids.

I went on a field trip.

So I had a car full of kids.

I had a van full of kids.

But these words, if you look

them up, they don't actually exist.

They're just a very informal way of saying that every

seat in your vehicle has a person in it.

So you might say, oh, I had to drive my kids

to school, had to drive my neighbor's kids to school.

I had a car full of kids this morning or the

other day, I went to pick up my kids and all

of their friends wanted to come to our house.

So I had a whole van full of kids.

So again, these aren't really

words, but they are words.

So they aren't words in the sense that if

you look them up, they will be in some

dictionaries, but they're not official English words.

Carful and vanful club.

So a club refers to a group of

people who all have the same interest.

You might be in a bird watching club, you might be

in a chess club, you might be in an archery club.

By the way, I didn't join one, but I would like to.

You might be in a nature club.

So a club refers to a group of people

who all share the same interest in something.

Right now, sometime, actually not this spring,

but sometimes Jen is asked to make

a presentation at a gardening club.

A gardening club would be a group of people who

all enjoy gardening, and they get together once a month

or every other week to talk about that.

So a chess club would meet regularly and it would be

a group of people who all like to play chess.

They would get together, play, play chess. An audience.

I think this one is familiar to you,

but I did want to talk about the

difference between spectators, a crowd and an audience.

So an Audience.

Is anyone watching something on a stage or on a screen?

So we wouldn't use this to talk about a football game.

You wouldn't say there was a

large audience at the football game.

Fact, I broke my own rule there by saying something

out loud that we don't normally say in English.

You would say, how big was the audience at the play?

Were there a lot of people in the theatre?

Yeah, it was a huge audience for the movie.

So an audience is for anything like a play.

If you're watching dancers, if you go to

a magic show, if you're watching a movie,

we would call you the audience, the group

of people who are watching what is happening.

A more general term would be crowd. So was there a.

Was there a.

A pretty big crowd?

Oh, you went to the new movie.

Uh, was it a pretty big crowd?

And you would say, yeah, there was

actually, the theater was quite full.

It was a big crowd.

So a more general term.

And then spectator or fans are the words we use to

talk about the group of people who watch a sports game.

So when I go and watch the

Toronto Blue Jays, I'm a spectator.

I could also use the word fan.

Okay, so there are spectators in this stadium.

There are fans in this stadium watching

this game and hopefully enjoying it. Crew.

So crew is used in a lot of ways.

You can use crew to talk about this type of group.

This is a group of people doing physical labour.

So at work, I might be on a team, but

as a teacher, I would never be on a crew.

But if I was fixing roads or building houses or any

of that physical labour, I might be on a crew.

So this is a road crew.

They are here to fix the road.

You can also use the word crew to

talk about the people who are on a

ship, even an airplane or even a spaceship.

They are the people who make the boat go, the

people who steer the boat, the people who load the

boat and empty the boat, they work on the boat.

So this is the crew of this ship.

And this is a crew working on the road.

And again, just to clarify, a crew is

usually a group of people doing physical labour.

Like they're shoveling, they're

digging, they're cutting.

It wouldn't be used to talk about people at a

job where you're just pushing paper like I do.

So here is a crew working on

the road, a crew on a ship.

So this word has two pronunciations, and

I say cleek, some people say click.

This is a group of people, usually teenagers, who

are friends, but it usually implies that they don't

allow other people be part of the group. Cliques.

I'm going to use the word clique.

You can say click if that's how you want to learn it.

Cliques are, by nature a little bit rude.

You know, your high school experience might be that there

was a clique of guys who were friends and they

didn't want anyone else to be friends with them.

There was a clique of girls, and

they were just kind of rude.

They wouldn't let other people join them.

And then we also have the word cliquey.

Like, they're acting very cliquey.

Like, if five teachers always went for a

walk at lunch together, we would say, oh,

they're being a little bit cliquey because they're

choosing to be their own little group.

So I guess you can use it for adults as well.

Um, class.

So this is probably a familiar one as well.

Class is used to refer to a

group of people who are learning.

It's used to refer to a group of students.

So when you have a classroom full of students or

a class full of students, we call them a class.

So when I go to school today,

I have to teach two classes.

I have a class of computer students, and

I have a class of French students.

So each group is there to learn that subject,

and I refer to them as my class.

So this is my class of computer students.

This is my class of French students.

A band.

So a band is a group of people who

get together to play instruments and to sing.

If they're good, they also write songs and

they will then sing their own songs.

A cover band sings other people's songs, but

a band hopefully has their own songs.

This is the Police.

This is the band I'm currently listening to as I

journey through relistening to the songs of my youth.

Uh, if you recognize any of them,

you'll probably recognize Sting in the middle.

And on the far side is Andy

Summers, and this is Stuart Copeland.

Um, they wrote some pretty good songs.

It's been my playlist for a few weeks

now, and I am very much enjoying it.

So a band is a group of

people who play instruments and sing.

Um, a band can also just play instruments.

They don't have to sing.

But the general.

The general definition would be they

play instruments and sing songs.

Cast.

So a cast is the group of people

in a play or movie or TV show.

Generally more for a play.

Like, if you go see a stage play, like in a theatre

with people on stage, we would say they are the cast.

And I'm just Thinking now you also have the people

behind the scenes who we would call the crew.

So there's another version of crew there.

But this is the cast of this play.

They are the actors.

They learn their lines and they

perform the play on stage.

But yes, cast and crew.

So you can have a crew working on the road,

a crew on a ship, and then the crew is

the people behind the scenes of a play who make

everything work the way it's supposed to. A board.

So this is a very official business term.

A business might be so big that it has

a boss, but it might also have a board

or sometimes called a board of directors.

These are the most important people at that

business, and they make all of the decisions.

This could possibly be the board of a large company.

Sometimes it's called a board of trustees.

A board of directors.

It has a variety of names, but

the general term would be the board.

So there is, in my place of work, a school board.

A school board is a group of people

who tell the individual schools what to do.

So a board, it's like a group of

people who are the boss instead of.

I mean, there's still a boss, but the

board would be the group of people who.

Who make the big decisions.

I've never been on a board.

Someday I would like to be on a board.

I think that would be fun.

A panel.

So a panel is a group of people, usually who have

knowledge in a specific area, asked to sit on a stage

so that someone can ask them questions and interview them.

If you've ever gone to any kind of

convention for work, they might say, oh, in.

In the main hall, there's going to be

a panel of experts and they're going to

answer questions about global warming or something like

that and how it will affect your business.

So here we have what I would say is

four experts and someone who is leading the discussion.

You don't normally have a panel of

people without one person kind of asking

them questions and then interviewing them.

So this would be a panel

of experts talking about something important.

I don't know.

I just found the picture online.

I'm assuming that they are experts.

I don't actually know alumni.

So alumni would be the group of people who all

graduated from a specific school or college or university.

So when you complete your university degree, you

graduate, you are now part of the alumni.

So if they ever have a reunion, they

will contact the alumni, the group of people

that grows larger every year of the group

of people that have graduated from that institution.

Alumni staff.

So staff is used to Refer to people at a workplace.

All the people at a workplace.

If I owned a restaurant and if it was a

large restaurant, I might have a staff of 30 people.

You know, four chefs, 15 servers.

Like, I might have a huge staff.

If I look at my school, my school

has a staff of about 35 people.

So those are all the people that work there.

So generally, though, we use staff to talk

about places of work, like restaurants, office buildings.

If I had a construction company, I would most likely say

I have 10 people working for me, two crews of five.

I probably wouldn't use staff

to talk about construction workers.

So it does mean, like, people who

work in a place like this.

Um, I have a staff of me for YouTube.

I'm the only one on staff.

Uh, there's no one else.

And this is where the word staff room comes from.

In a school, you have a staff room.

Because the staff at my school go

to the staff room for a choir.

A choir is a group of people who love

to sing, and then they get together and they

have a choir director, and they learn songs, and

then they perform the songs to an audience.

So a choir is something that I have never been part of.

I am not able to sing on key very well.

Uh, and so a choir, though, is awesome to listen to.

When I'm in the audience and I hear a

choir, especially at Christmas, it is very, very cool.

So a choir, that's the name for a group of people who.

And it's a formal group.

Like, it's not.

Oh, it's a choir.

Anyone can come.

Usually it's like 20, 30, 40, 50 people

who meet regularly to practice a set of

songs so that they can perform them.

So it's somewhat official, a committee.

So a committee is similar to a team.

Uh, a committee is usually in charge of something,

and it's usually a relatively small group of people.

So at my place of work, sometimes I'm

on a team to tackle a project.

Sometimes I'm on a committee every year.

So one of the committees at

our school is the social committee.

And their job is to plan an interesting

and fun thing the teachers to do every

other month so that we stay happy.

So basically a committee, a group of people who

are in charge of one thing, a troop.

So you can have a dance troupe,

you can have a troupe of soldiers.

They sound the same.

They are spelled different.

So this is a troop of, I think, dancers.

We wouldn't use this for

singers necessarily, if you were.

Yeah, mostly for dancers.

Like, if you have ever been in a

dance group, it would Be called a troop.

Usually it means they're paid, though, I think.

And then of course, in the army you have troops, but you

can also refer to a whole group of them as a troop.

So there was a troop of soldiers

that were walking down the street force.

So you can use this to talk about the police.

You could say that he is on the police

force, or you could even shorten it and just

say, how long has he been on the force?

So if you have a friend who is a police officer,

you could say, oh, my friend, she's on the police force.

Or she's on the force. How long?

Once you say police force, you can

just use the word force after that.

Um, so my town has a really small police force.

I think the force only has two

officers because the town is so small.

A jury.

So if you watch any kind of television,

you are probably familiar with a jury.

So a jury is a group of

people who listen to a court case.

It will be presented by two lawyers and they will have

to decide if the person in court is guilty or not.

So if you watch a TV show where the

police catch someone and then they take that person

to court, you will sometimes see a jury, a

group of people who listen to each lawyer.

They listen to the evidence, the proof, and then they

need to decide if that person is guilty or not.

And then, of course, we just have the word people.

You could use the word people

to talk about groups of people.

So this is kind of a funny one.

The most common phrase is probably like, ah, people are

crazy, or people aren't as kind as they should be.

So you can use it to start a sentence, the word people.

And you are referring almost to

the whole world, I guess.

I wish people were kinder, Wish

people helped each other more.

I wish people were just nicer sometimes.

So there's how you can use that to

talk about a large undefined group of people,

basically everyone in the world or your community.

And then we have, of course, family.

So family is the word used to describe the group

of people who are all related to each other.

Grandparents, parents, kids, cousins, uncles, aunts.

We call that group family.

So a family then can be small.

So you can just talk about the parents and the kids.

But family can also refer to all

of the people who are related.

Um, so how big is your family?

Well, my family, um, if I counted all of

my uncles and aunts and cousins, it's quite large.

If I just count my household, there are seven of us.

So family, the group of people who

are all related to each other.