The three collective nouns you will hear most often for pigs are drift, drove, and sounder. Beyond those, a group of pigs can also be called a fleet, herd, trip, team, flock, singular, passel, or parcel. Young pigs together are known as a litter or a farrow, and wild pigs travelling as a group are usually a sounder or a singular. When the animals are especially heavy, weighing more than 54 kg, the words parcel and passel come into play.
Both drift and drove trace back to the Old English verb drifan, meaning to drive or push. The words originally described the work of moving a herd of pigs from one place to another. People still use them in the same way today, for a group of pigs being driven or herded along together.
