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.
Fish: anything that swims
Bird: anything that flies
Floof: anything small and furry
Behemoth: anything large and stompy
Leviathan: anything large and swimmy
Beast: anything big and bitey or not otherwise categorized
Bats – the quintessential floof bird.
Beaver – halfway between beast and floof
Floofbird, floofbeast! Love it. I think we’re done here.
That’s not too far off from how Germans name animals.
Bat: flutter mouse Skunk: stink beast Tortoise: shield toad Raccoon: wash bear Porcupine: spike pig Turkey: threatening chicken
There’s so many more! Go look some up for a laugh.
The most interesting part is their base set of animals
Toads, bears, pigs and fish. What else do you need? 😂
In Germany? Nothing, they’re all the same in the wurst anyway
Well this was a fun game to play with the family. Here’s some words we came up with:
Algae
Amphibians Animals Annual
Aquatic Baby Bacteria
Beasts Bipedal Birds Blossoms Buggers Bugs Bushes Cacti Carnivores Cats Crabs Crawler Creatures Creepy-crawly Critters Critters Dogs Dolphins Domesticated Estuarine Fauna Fern Fish Flora
Flutterer
Flyer
Foliage
Forager
Fowl Fungi Furballs Game
Grasses Herbivores Herbs Insects Invertebrates Larvae
Lentic Lichens Lizards Lotic Mammals Marine Microbes Mini-beasts Molds
Moss Moths Nestling
Old Omnivores Pelagic Perennial
Pests Plankton Pond dwellers Pray Predators Primates Protozoa
Prowler
Quadrapedal Reptiles Reptiles Riverine Rodents Scavengers Seedlings Serpents Sharks Shelled Shrubs Spores Swimmer
Symbiotes Trees Tropical Varmint
Vertebrates Vines Viri
Weeds Wetland Whales Wild Worms Yeasts Young xerophyticHope that was helpful.
Reading the comments on this makes me realize how often we think about animals, considering we apparently have thousands of different ways to categorize them, even if it’s more by vibe than anything else…
I categorize all things by vibe
Keeps shit mellow
But how do you categorize vibes?
Groovily
Far out, man, far out.
And here we thought baraminology would never be useful for anything.
The biggest difficulty with answering this question I think is that I don’t know how broad the categories should be. Do you have an estimate of how many categories you’re looking for?
Honestly, my main motivation here is to pick all of your brains to see how many different category-words there are, then change my game plan to react to the natural language words. For example, if we didn’t have words more specific than Animal, Plant, Fungus, and Bacteria, I could slap a four-color mana system on that and call it a day. Obviously that’s not the case, but in the unlikely system that I can describe all of creation using only 20ish names i could imitate Cardfight Vanguard and make them into a sort of clan system and do lots of clan-exclusive comboing off each other. Any more than that, I imitate Magic instead: certain cards care a whole lot about types (e.g.: Kavu you control are red in addition to their other colors, Red creatures you control have haste) while others pay more attention to subtypes (e.g.: Tap 12 Allies you control: draw a card) and other just don’t discriminate, affecting everything or nothing.
Collective noun might be the word you’re looking for. This list is for animals in particular.
You want broad sweeping categories? Maybe categorize by behaviour?
Crawlers Slitherers Swimmers Flyers Stationary creatures Sunlight eaters Carnivores Plant eaters Omnivores
I think decide what your groups actually are first, then label. So a fish in this list would be swimming carnivore.
