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Trying to come up with a list of vague words for different "kinds of animals". Help? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.