I’m fiddling with a card game concept, and a very important part of it is creatures interacting with other specific kinds of creatures. This necessarily means I need to come up with lots of type names that are descriptive but vague enough to shove literally anything in them. Here’s some good examples: “bug” containing ants, shrimps, pillbugs, bees, and literally anything that could be called a creepy crawly; “fish” containing everything from salmon to sharks to eels to octopi; “trees” containing all the stuff you are thinking of as well as those precambrian 6-foot fungi pillars; and “cats” including housecats, big cats, cheetah, and carcals.
And that’s everything I can think of that would be useful. You see my problem? I know there are other casual-usage words for big categories of critters, but my grasp of the Enlgish language is fickle and leaves me whenever it is most inconvenient. If there is a list I could work from, that would be very helpful. Otherwise, volunteer as many words as you think would be useful.
Canid and canine generally mean any of the dog-like animals: domestic dogs, wolves, fox, coyotes, dingoes, jackals, wild dogs
Parrot applies to members of the Psittacine family: parrots, macaws, parakeets, cockatiels, cockatoos, parrotlets, lorikeets
Herps and herpetofauna are used to collectively refer to amphibians and reptiles: frogs, salamanders, newts, lizards, turtles, snakes
Bear means all actual bear species but is also often used in reference to pandas and koalas (just don’t say it in front of my scientifically accurate kid)
Waterfowl is ducks, geese, swans
Depending on why or how you’re using categories, you can also group by characteristics: Do they have fur, feathers, or scales Do they lay eggs or give birth Are they predator or prey Do they eat meat, plants, fruit, pollen, or some combination
So it sounds like you could make categories that are
- location based: sky (flying), jungle
- climate based: ice/cold, desert
- task based: tunneling animals, builder animals, nest making animals
You could also start from a list of animals and then categorize them afterwards based on what you have. As for a list, maybe by biological families or classes?
Octopi aren’t fish.
Do you mean collective nouns ?
Or just “generic groups”, as in animal, plant, rock, fungi, lichen ?
Maybe group words that aren’t as specific as collective nouns and not as generic as groups:
- canine
- marsupial
- mammal
- primates
- carnivores
- vertebrates
- reptiles
- birds
Does that help?
My justification for calling octopi fish is that I asked a pre-schooler what kind of animal an octopus was, and he told me it was a fish because it breathes water and swims in the ocean. That said, maybe cephalopods could be their own type because they tend to be solitary, which would be thematically relevant to why they wouldn’t combo off each other.
IDK any list like that. Why not make the list in your own language and see how much can translate to English without distorting the meaning too much?
