What is the collective noun for a group of giraffes?

Solution 1:

How about looking at the statistics?

I searched the iWeb corpus for _nn* of giraffes, where the first item matches nouns. Looking at the most relevant nouns, I see these numbers of results for each:

• herd: 44*
• tower: 22*
• herds: 17
• group: 17*
• family: 16
• groups: 6
• kaleidoscope: 2*
• menagerie: 1
• flock: 1

*Includes sites that are listing terms for groups of giraffes

(I suggest looking at the results yourself; it’s easy.)

Solution 2:

What's going on here is that the teacher is engaging in the game of venery, which is just a fancy way of saying "making up names for groups of animals". This is why a pack of lions is a pride and flock of crows is a murder.

For the most part, these terms of venery have no traction in the scientific community. The only exception is the pride of lions - almost nobody calls it a pack, I only did to make my point. Scientifically speaking, giraffes form herds (because they're grazing ungulates that aren't sheep).

That doesn't mean you can't call it a tower or a kaleidoscope of giraffes, even in scientific papers (I'm sure plenty of scientific papers have referred to murders of crows), but you have to be careful to specify the animal the first few times you use the term.