the.com/unkindness
Also the official name for a group of ravens, which feels accurate.
means The quality of being unkind — a lack of kindness or an act of cruelty, however small.
from Formed straightforwardly in Middle English from 'unkind' plus the noun suffix '-ness.' 'Kind' itself once meant 'natural' or 'of the same family' (related to 'kin'), so to be 'unkind' originally carried a whiff of acting against nature or against one's own people, before it settled into simply meaning cruel or unfeeling. The 'unkindness of ravens' is a separate thread: one of the fanciful collective nouns — like a 'murder of crows' — recorded in 15th-century hunting and courtesy books, where writers delighted in inventing dramatic group names for animals. Whether it reflects real observation of raven behavior or just medieval wordplay is genuinely unclear, but the phrase stuck.
- collective noun
- flock of ravens is called an unkindness
- first recorded
- 15th-century hunting terms loved dramatic flair
- actual meaning
- cruelty without the effort of malice
- opposite word
- kindness, obviously, but less fun to say